Dali returned several times to the theme of the Classical goddess of love and the modern sailor in the mid 1920s. Not only does he encapsulate within this encounter a many-layered relationship between tradition and modernity, Neo-Classicism and the avant -garde, but also the life of the Mediterranean port. The Neo-Classical figure of Venus looks to Picasso’s classicism of the early 1920s; the massive, slightly flattened curves of her body and the simple white drapery recall Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring, while the vigorous dance of the unfinished Venus and Sailor of 1926 is closer to a work like The Race (Two Women running on the Beach) What is often called “the return to order” was for Picasso a deeply pondered dialogue with the art of the past.

Picasso’s comments about the great masters were to echo in Dali’s own writings: “It’s only the Masters who count.”. Just before his premature death in 1918 Apollinaire had written to Picasso urging him to do some “grand paintings like Poussin’s,” and described his own attempt “to renew the accent of poetry while retaining a classical rhythm.” Dali’s paintings, however, mix the flatter, abstract planes of late Cubism and Purism with the Neo-Classical more impudently than Picasso ever did. The sailor in Venus and Sailor is like a ghostly, flat cut-out, while in Depart the shifts in scale, the doubled figure of the sailor and the over-lapping profiles of the two heads introduce a dimension of time and memory reminiscent of Futurism. Dali’s connections with contemporary Catalan literature and culture in the mid 1920s are often overlooked in favor of his striking experiments with avant-garde European art. The juxtaposition of classical and cubist modes in these three paintings reflects the uneasy but often fruitful tension between Noucentisme and the avant-garde in Catalonia.

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