Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down. The full sheet is rectangular in format and measures 18 1/4 by 13 1/2 in. (46.4 by 34.4 cm). The sheet is fixed to the mount at four points along the perimeter. Remnants of old tape and an old water stain are visible on the reverse. There is a small faint flattened crease running horizontally in the upper right area of the composition and another running diagonally across each of the upper corners (not visible when framed). Otherwise, apart from some light time-staining, this work is in very good condition.
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Executed in 1965, the present work is a powerful example both of the Salvador Dalí’s fascination with developments in science and technology as well as an acknowledgment of the contemporary Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Space Race, which commenced in 1955 with a competition between the two powers to launch a satellite, reached its zenith with the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969 and later ended in a 1972 agreement of cooperation, came to bracket and epitomize Cold War relations between the two countries. In the present work two astronauts, on either side of a smiling moon, seem to float in space. The moon’s face, moreover, appears to separate into atomic particles, highlighting concepts Dalí had explored in his art for at least a decade: the relatively recent scientific developments in the understanding of matter.

Dalí had expolored these principles in an earlier work entitled Raphaelesque Head Exploded (see fig. 1). He further absorbed himself with the topic, explaining in his Manifeste Mystique: “We observe that each quarter hour and second matter is in a constant and accelerated process of dematerialization, of disintegration, escaping the hand of scientists and showing us the sprituality of all substance, for the physical light of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical activity too is at one and the same time ‘wave and corpuscle” (as quoted in Dawn Ades, ed., Dalí’s Optical Illusions (exhibition catalogue), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. & Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2000, p. 160).

L’Homme sur la lune also references filmaking, another of Dalí’s principal passions. Two years before his birth, Georges Méliès’s famed film Le Voyage dans la Lune was screened in Dalí’s birthplace of Figueres (see fig. 2). The iconic image of the man in the moon, here with a space capsule in his right eye, would have been well known to the artist. Dalí's collaborations with the film industry resulted in some of the most visually spectacular films of the twentieth century, from the hallucinatory imagery in Walt Disney's Destino to the feverish dream sequences in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound. Such an important, early work as Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune wou🐠ld have formed a substantial part of Dalí’s artistic and cinematic vocabulary.

The present work is not the only example we find of Dalí inserting faces into extra-terrestrial bodies. The same year he created L’Homme sur la lune, Dalí incorporated his own self portrait into The Sun and Dalí (see fig. 3). It has been discussed: “The elision of Dalí’s head and the sun relates to Dalí’s personal mythology of the family… Dalí was perfectly aware of the pun in English sun/son” (ibid., p. 176).

 

Fig. 1 Salvador Dalí, Raphaelesque Head Exploded, 1951, oil on canvܫas, National Gallery of Modernꦗ Art, Edinburgh, on extended loan since 1987

Fig. 2 Hand-colored still from Georges Méliès' film A Trip to the Moon, 1902

 Fig. 3 Salvador Dalí, The Sun and Dalí, 1965, Private Collection