The Egrets

Venus in Furs was a novel by Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose word and name are the inspiration and origin of the word “masochism.” It is a novel about a man whose chief pleasure was to be thrashed by a beautiful woman wearing nothing more than a fur coat. Salvador Dali often portrayed himself as a man, a woman, or a hermaphrodite, either in pain or inflicting pain, in a setting where Eros and Thanatos laugh at each other—a major, powerful work, where Dali’s freedom of line and thought is best expressed.