Works

The painting shows a landscape near Ampurdan, the antique Emporion. At first glance, the scenery does not appear unusual, if we were not troubled by the almost photo-realistic painting and its mysterious title. Dalí painted the strange figure of the well dressed man in the foreground using a newspaper photograph of the Austrian doctor Rudolf Eisenmenger, taken when he was presenting a heart massage device he had invented. However, the figure gains a new identity in memory of the pharmacist Alexander Deu Lofen, a friend of Dalí's, who lived in the painter's home town and who had written a book on the ›Mathematics of History‹. Like in many other of his works, Dalí goes beyond the limits of association in his placing the absurd in a veristic depiction, thus transforming it into a new reality which he called the paranoid process of thinking.
Having trained in the Madrid Academy, the artist got to know the Valori Plastici of the so-called Pittura Metafisica and the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico in the middle of the 1920's through journals found there. In 1928/29 Dalí traveled to Paris, there meeting Picasso among others. He came under the influence of Juan Miró and maintained contacts with the group of Surrealists around André Breton.