Woman with Whip

Salvador Dalí depicted women with whips in his “Venus in Furs” series to explore themes of female dominance, sadomasochism, and the power dynamics between genders, drawing inspiration from the novel “Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which heavily features these themes; the whip symbolizes a woman’s control and agency in a typically male-dominated power dynamic, aligning with the surrealist style of expressing subconscious desires and anxieties through provocative imagery.