Which artist created the 1929 Surrealist painting The Great Masturbator?

Salvador Dalí created the 1929 Surrealist painting The Great Masturbator.

The Great Masturbator is an oil painting built around a distorted, biomorphic head-like form. Dalí combined autobiographical references, erotic anxiety, insects, rocks, and dream imagery in a tightly rendered composition. The title reflects the painting’s deliberately provocative engagement with desire and the unconscious.

Dalí painted the work during a crucial period in his relationship with Surrealism and soon after meeting Gala, who became his partner and lifelong muse. The painting’s imagery is not intended as a straightforward portrait; rather, it combines recurring motifs from Dalí’s personal visual vocabulary.

The title can be confused with Dalí’s later works because sexuality and bodily transformation appear throughout his art. It is also separate from The Persistence of Memory, the 1931 painting with melting watches. The Great Masturbator is held by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.