Salvador Dali!

'The legal concept of the femme couverte, whereby a woman, upon marrying, was absorbed into the person of her husband, was described by the eighteenth-century British scholar, Sir William Blackstone in terms of that reached for the metaphysical. "The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything," Blackstone wrote, in his "Commentaries on the Laws of England." The notion that a woman who marries is, as if by some peculiar bio-chemical process, transformed into something like an extra organ of her husband, as functional and compliant as a healthy kidney, has ceased to exercise much persuasive power among the general public.'

The New Yorker, June 2005.

It's sort of charming how the male-female relationship has been studied and understood, in a vast number of perspectives and a wide variety of contexts. Recently, I was at the Dali exhibition in Philadelphia, where I learnt about the Paranoiac-critical method, in which Dali took seemingly inanimate, innocuous objects and lent them a life of their own, through a paranoid vision in which the objects themselves would acquire life and start speaking to the artist. In this painting which is called 'Angelus' (1933), Dali redoes Millet's Angelus, which portrays a peasant farmer and his wife on a somber evening. This picture is a beautiful impressionist painting conveying a serenity that is emphasized by the quietness of the wife’s prayers, and the isolation of this couple on the vast farm plain. If there are two things that this painting is not, then those are violence and aggressive. But Dali had paranoiac delusions when he first saw Millet's Angelus, by which he was both intrigued and terrified at the same time. In his vision, the calm of the painting is a misleading disguise of the rapacity hidden 'in between the lines'. In fact, Dali was so mesmerized by the painting that he ended up writing an entire book on the 'Tragic Myth of Angelus by Millet'. In Dali's interpretation, both the man and the woman in Millet's painting are transformed into two stone-objects, with the male object unambiguously dominant in size. However, it is the female stone that is the aggressor, with the male stone conveying a sense of obedience and submission, whereas the woman stone portraying a greed and voracity! I think this is as diverse an interpretation as one could possibly get of this extremely real, impressionist painting. An interesting wake up call for an awakening of the mind that tells us that while things around us, in our universe may have existed for centuries now, there are still new ways to perceive, have perspectives that are completely novel, creative and unique; a feeling necessary at some level to allow one to feel distinguished from everyone else. There is a lot of art in diversity of perspectives!