L’Àngelus c. 1934 - 1935

Salvador Dalí painted this mysterious image as a meditation on Jean-François Millet’s famous painting, *The Angelus*. Dalí was a product of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe. He was interested in exploring the subconscious, and sought to overturn the conservative social structures of his native Spain. Here, the figures from Millet’s original painting are rendered as dark silhouettes, while other aspects of the painting seem to float freely, as if in a dreamscape. Dalí was fascinated by the cultural obsession with Millet's The Angelus, and he obsessively re-created and re-contextualized the artwork within his surrealist visual language. He makes the mundane monumental, the invisible visible, and the irrational logical. To understand an image like this, it's helpful to consider the politics of imagery and the social conditions that shape artistic production. We can ask: what kind of cultural work does art do? By consulting a wide variety of historical sources, we can understand art as something contingent on social and institutional context.