The Spectre of Sex Appeal, 1932 by Salvador Dali

Huge and decaying on the beach, the rickety, propped-up figure of Sex Appeal is not a pretty sight; sex-appall might be a more appropriate term for this random collection of limbs, tenuously attached to a torso composed of sacks and ragged wrappings. The head merges into the rocks in a typical Dali double image, and the amputated and ravaged extremities suggest the aftereffects of cannibalism, an idea always closely linked with sex in Dali's mind.

According to his own account, the small boy in the sailor suit is Dali at the age of six, holding a hoop in one hand and an ossified penis in the other. The identical figure reappears 35 years later in The Hallucinogenic Toreador. A cove is a real place, close to Cadaques, which Dali had probably known from his childhood.