La Victoire 1967

Salvador Dalí made this work, ‘La Victoire’, in 1967 using watercolor and ink. It’s all about these transparent washes and drippy marks of thinned paint. I can imagine him flicking the brush to get those thin spattery lines above the crowds. I imagine he was trying to capture some kind of feeling. There is a crowd of people with arms raised and a series of flags or banners above. The blue ink he used for the symbols is so pale it’s almost like a memory. Then there’s a broad stroke in the bottom right in a darker ink that feels so assertive. It's almost like he’s slicing through the layers of the painting. Dalí was a wild man, of course, so I wonder what other artists he was looking at when he made this. Maybe he was aware of Abstract Expressionism and was trying to bring some of that gesture and spontaneity into his own surrealist language? It feels like a historical painting but one that embraces the chaos of freedom.