Here are two Surrealist skulls:

• Salvador Dali, Skull of Zurbarán (1956) 
• Paul Delvaux, Skeletons in an Office (1944) 

There’s a little information about them alongside what I consider the aspartame of analysis, since the goal is just a very brief glance, not a deep, lingering, full-fat look.

Squelettes dans un Bureau

Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter considered a Surrealist despite only briefly working with the Surrealists. Surrealist techniques disposing with ‘reality’ appear to have erased constraints for him, with the artist noting that ‘painting lit lamps’ alongside ‘Roman arches’ unlocked ‘great inventiveness’. 

He used skeletons as a leitmotif but publicly available research or commentary on his work focuses on the female nudes. This makes it difficult not to scoff at societal attitudes to skeletons and skulls, but the lack of cranial content encountered likely reflects my weaknesses as a researcher. 



This painting is titled ‘Squelettes dans un Bureau’ translating to ‘Skeletons in an Office’. In some sources it’s called ‘Skeletons in an Office (Waiting for the Librarian)’. It measures 99 x 123.5 cm and features a library with six skeletons in it. Delvaux’s title is funny, echoing my experience in trying to write this because I too was waiting for the librarian (Facebook group admin to give me institutional PDF access). 

The skeletons are used as stand-ins for humans, which he did frequently. Initially, this creates humor from the expectation gap: boney entity doing human thing. Beyond being funny, the use of the skeleton has an anonymising and slightly objectifying effect. In the setting of an office, this is effective. A 21st century reading can’t help but affiliate ‘drones’, interchangeability, thing-ifying humans with a work setting. 

We don’t read the skeletons as mindless machines with negative connotations perhaps because the setting is cheerful; there’s a big sunny window and we appear to be safe high up in a building. The skeleton placed near the window looking outwards implies there is something to look up, or forward to, which is optimistic. Positive associations of productivity arise from being in a library, and through the collaboration implied by the six skeletons’ awareness of each other’s presence. I wonder if the literary mood of this painting prompted several novelists to reference or respond to Delvaux in their work.

The skeletons poses are carefree, very natural so while they may appear inquisitive or engaged, they don’t seem stressed (likely the skeletal ‘grin’ effect makes us feel like they’re smiling, subconsciously). 

He didn’t paint this as crisply or eerily as some of his other skeletons, in fact it reads as a storybook style and I would not be surprised to find this on the cover of a young adult book. This seems intentional, given skeletons were a nostalgic motif for him, a symbol that he found beauty in after being afraid of them as a child. The Surrealists were also fascinated with Alice in Wonderland, which is a children’s book, perhaps that was in the back of Delvaux’s mind when painting this.

I see this as an uplifting painting but note that Belgium (like much of Europe) was war-torn while Delvaux was experiencing this fascination with skeletons (war : bodies, death). It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m obsessed with skulls post-pandemic, perhaps reinforcing that all light needs dark for balance.

Skull of Zurbarán

 
We all know Dali, and today I’m finding him especially grating, so let’s keep biography minimal. This is a painting from 1956, in his ‘classical period’ where he explored (according to the Dali fangay organisation museum) ‘meticulously detailed images of religious, historical and scientific themes’: what he called ‘nuclear mysticism’. He remarried wife Gala in a Catholic Church in 1958. I conjecture he influenced Kanye West to infuse his relationship with Bianca Censori with the same caudalism as his own marriage.



The skull referenced here belongs to Fransisco de Zurbarán. He was a Spanish painter known for dramatic chiaroscuro (very strong light-dark contrast), monks and still-lifes. 

He painted in a Baroque style, which – apologies – I find tremendously boring. The most interesting thing Zurbarán did is infuse his monks with little context, little narrative and use mostly bluey, cool tones instead of the warmth of something like “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright. Without the title, you would not know this is the skull of Zurbarán.

Initial associations:

• Archway: knowledge, journey
• Monks: religion, thobes
• Tesselated Cubes: Zellij, mosque, math, Ibn Battuta, precision, technology
• Bulbuous temple: Temple (lol), wisdom, unknowable, moon and craters
• Skull: MF Doom, Marvel comic villains, Phantom of the Opera, Ballerina en tête de mort, death, warning
• Color of ‘skull’: gilded, riches, earthly, promise
• Height of space relative to monks: cavernous, echoey, important

The skull doesn’t easily read as a human skull, which is why I selected this painting in contrast to the explicit skeletal presence in Delvaux’s painting. This skull reads masklike. However, it’s irrefragably a skull because of Dali’s title.

We tend to reflect on mortality as we get older, which is why renewed religious focus or conversion (reversion if to Islam) is common amongst middle-aged people. When your vessel (body) begins to creak with age, it seems obvious to think about your afterlife, and indeed morality. Since he’s just like other girls, Dali experienced a ‘reversion’ to his Catholic roots in middle age – the roots which were initially blamed for (gasp) guilt about sexuality (interestingly manifesting in him being a virgin when he first met Gala). 

He valued the ‘perfect architecture’ of the faith, this admiration led him to paint a well-received rendering of the Immaculate Conception for Pope Pius XII in 1949. This ‘perfection’ may be reflected in the mathematical precision of the tesselated squares, and in the painting itself being a perfect square, 1.03 x 1.03 meters.

This is the context in which monks approach the archway. Which leads me to a relatively generic interpretation of religious journey, reverence. The destination aimed for being Zurbarán’s skull echoes Dali’s reverence for master artists in Spain, I personally hear the message that to emulate or exceed the greats, you must first approach them. The destination being positive or great is reinforced because the temple of the skull resembles a cratered moon. The two cubes in the bottom left of the skull have small archways, doors perhaps to options. One arch is cracked with what resembles water damage, one painted very out-of-focus. The cracked arch symbolises a negative path. Since it’s in a skull which houses a mind, perhaps speaking to some negative facet of self in both Zurbarán and Dali. The unfocused archway perhaps is about the unknowable, what’s inside you that you have yet to discover, and maybe if you did see it you wouldn’t know what it was. 

More interesting details here are the colors in the lighting on the tesselated cube flooring, very delicately rendered purples and greens, giving a …well, surreal and otherwordly feeling. The precision of tesselation alongside it’s zellij association injects a (muted) note of optimism: it feels futuristic, technological, glowy. I doubt Dali intended to reference Islamic architecture; then again he would’ve been well aware of Spain’s Muslim past. The zellij, archway, skull surface echoing lunar all scream Islam to me which carries connotations of earned peace, practice and repetitive handmade work.

The skull here appears to signal wisdom, religious consciousness of mortality, reverence, inner exploration, armor and (due to the muted color palette) a mild warning. 

That’s all I want to say today about this painting, which is more than I can find online.