Art & Creativity Quote by Salvador Dali

Dali is doing what he did best: turning a provocation into a sales pitch for his own sensibility. “Hungry and thirsty” frames the viewer less as an enlightened eye than as a body with cravings. He’s not politely arguing about aesthetics; he’s staging a return to appetite, to the idea that images should be biteable, memorable, almost indecently present. In Dali’s world, abstraction isn’t an evolution. It’s a famine.

The dagger twist is in “virginity.” Figurative art is imagined as something that can be sullied by habit, repetition, and polite museum familiarity. By this logic, abstraction functions as a kind of chastity belt: it breaks the complacency that made representation feel predictable. Once abstraction has stripped painting down to gesture, surface, and idea, the return of a body, a face, a landscape can shock again. Dali’s subtext is competitive, even territorial: let the abstract painters do the cleansing work, and the figurative artist will re-enter like a messiah of the image.

Context matters. Mid-century modernism was treating representation as suspect, even bourgeois. Dali, the Surrealist who never stopped loving the old masters’ draftsmanship, answers with a cunning compromise: he concedes abstraction’s usefulness, but only as an intermission. The line flatters the avant-garde while quietly demoting it to a preparatory phase for what he really values - illusion, precision, and narrative charge. It’s a backhanded tribute that doubles as a manifesto for making figuration weird, sharp, and newly scandalous.