The Mad Tea Party is an engraving by Salvador Dali created in 1969. It depicts a melting clock on a tree trunk, a key, and many butterflies (Dali, 1969). The work is based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which served as inspiration for Dalí (Martin & Jacobs, 2018). The tale tells the fantastic story of a girl, Alice, who finds herself in a world of absurdity. The absurd world opens in a rabbit hole populated by anthropomorphic creatures who want to meet Alice and keep her around forever.
The Mad Tea Party seamlessly weaves the basic plot of Alice in Wonderland and important stylistic details. Dali used the complexity of time and how Alice is confused about her hunches and the world around her. The clocks melt in the engraving because Alice cannot navigate space and time (Gibert, 2019). Dali portrayed the early surrealism to which he aspired. He was probably influenced by Carroll’s enthusiasm for creating a new reality inaccessible to the reader before the rabbit hole (Gibert, 2019). Dali accurately depicts the storyline of Alice in Wonderland (“Alice in Wonderland,” 2019). The engraving features a man who looks like a snail (trying to become a butterfly on a tree’s crown), Alice’s silhouettes, and a teapot and cups, the main images of the mad tea party to which Alice was invited.
Salvador Dali was attracted to metamorphosis: he respected old age and personality transformation. Dali Universe quotes him as saying, “let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture” (“Alice in Wonderland,” 2019). This may reflect his perception of Carroll’s story: no matter how surreal, unusual, and fabulous the events around Alice are, they make her who she is. Dali sought to preserve reason and valued it highly, so the image of Alice is, for him, a reminder of the flow of time, even if the clock shows it inaccurately and vaguely.
References
“Alice in Wonderland”. The girl child image central to Dalí’s Oeuvre. (2019). Dali Universe. Web.
Dali, S. (1969). Mad tea party [lithograph]. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, New Your, USA. Web.
Gibert, T. (2019). Exploring the surreal in Alice’s adventures in wonderland: Visual representations by Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel and Salvador Dalí. In Everything is a story: Creative interactions in Anglo-American studies. APEAA (pp.257-267).
Martin, F. D., & Jacobs, L. A. (2018). Humanities through the arts. (10th ed.). McGraw Hill Education.