How Sigmund Freud transformed modern art
Jennifer Higgie, Financial Times
June 2026
In 1938, Salvador Dalí drew a portrait of his hero, Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis had recently arrived in London after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna; the Spanish artist had spent years trying to meet him, but to no avail. The sitting was organised by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who was present, as was the British surrealist and aristocrat Edward James, who described the 34-year-old Dalí, his eyes “blazing with excitement”, sketching “hastily but accurately into a drawing book”. The artist had brought along his new painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus to show Freud, but the older man was suspicious of surrealism — he preferred the art of the Renaissance and antiquity. His response to Dalí’s observation that “Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral — to be extracted with a needle!” is, sadly, unrecorded. […]