Overview

Salavtor Dali was a prominent Spanish surrealist born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Career

• Dali got maximum attention from his fellow classmates for his paintings that mostly concentrated on Cubism art form. Dali had no direct contact with any cubist artist but his only source of information about Cubist art came from magazine articles and a catalogue given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time.
  
• In 1926 itself Dali produced his brilliant artwork, ‘Basket of Bread’ which upheld his highest mastery of painting. Again in 1926 Dali made another move by moving to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso (a pioneer of Cubism), whom the young Dalí revered. Many of Dali’s work bore heavy influences from Picasso and Joan Miró. Picasso heard a lot about Dali and his artistry and with time Dali grew his own form of art.
  
• Dali’s art form was extremely mixed and had a classic style. He drew influences from various forms of art and his classical influences included works of Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez. At times Dali combined classical and modernist techniques and at some other time he used these techniques separately in his paintings.
  
• In 1929 Dali got involved with his several significant exhibitions and he also became an official member of the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. Dali became famous with most Surrealists hailing him as a great artist for his tremendous efforts in the paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
  
• In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works “The Persistence of Memory” which reflected the core of surrealism - soft, melting pocket watches for the first time.
  
• Klee began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy in 1931. However, he was fired under Nazi rule in 1933 and moved with his family to Switzerland. He was at the peak of his career at this time. He soon started suffered from ill health and his output dropped considerably even though he continued painting until his last years.

Legacy

In Carlos Lozano's biography, Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me, produced with the collaboration of Clifford Thurlow, Lozano makes it clear that Dalí never stopped being a surrealist. As Dalí said of himself: "the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist".

He has been portrayed on film by Robert Pattinson in Little Ashes (2008), and by Adrien Brody in Midnight in Paris (2011). He was also parodied in a series of painting skits on Captain Kangaroo as "Salvador Silly" (played by Cosmo Allegretti) and in a Sesame Street muppet skit as "Salvador Dada" (an orange gold Anything Muppet performed by Jim Henson).

The Salvador Dalí Desert in Bolivia and the Dali crater on the planet Mercury are named for him.

On View

• Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• SCAD Museum of Art
• Dali Theatre and Museum
• Salvator Dali Museum
• National Gallery of Art East Buiding, Washington D.C.
• Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee
• Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich
• Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Gasgow
• The Wadsworth Stheneum Museum of Art

ArtWorks

Christ of St John of the Cross

This painting is known as Christ of Saint John of the Cross because its design is based on a drawing by the 16th-century Spanish friar John of the Cross. The composition consists of a triangle, which is formed by the arms of Christ and the horizontal of the cross; and a circle, which is formed by the head of Christ. The triangle might be seen as a reference to the Holy Trinity while the circle may represent unity, that is all things exist in the three.

Galatea of the Spheres

This painting is a portrait of Gala Dali, his wife and muse. Her face is composed of densely populated spheres, representing atomic particles, which give a marvelous three dimensional effect to the canvas. Galatea in the title refers to a sea-nymph in Classical Mythology named Galatea, who was renowned for her virtue. Galatea of the Spheres is one of the most renowned paintings from Dali’s Nuclear Mysticism period.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

According to Greek mythology, Narcissus, who was renowned for his beauty, fell in love with his own reflection in water. Dali’s interpretation of the Greek myth, this painting shows Narcissus sitting in a pool, gazing down. Metamorphosis of Narcissus was created by Dali during his paranoiac-critical period and is among his most renowned works using the technique.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans

Salvador Dali painted this masterpiece six months before the Spanish Civil War began. He claimed to have been aware of the war due to “the prophetic power of his subconscious mind”. The painting reflects his anxiety during the time and predicts the horror and violence in the war. It portrays two bodies, one darker than the other, in a gruesome fight where neither appears to be a victor. The monstrous creature is self-destructive just as a civil war is.

Swans Reflecting Elephants

This painting uses the reflection in a lake to create a double image. The three swans in front of the trees are reflected in the lake so that their necks become the elephants’ trunks and the trees become the legs of the elephants. The landscape contrasts with the stillness of the lake as Dali has used swirl-like images to depict the background cliffs and skies. Swans Reflecting Elephants is considered a landmark painting in Surrealism as it enhanced the popularity of the double-image style.

The Burning Giraffe

The Burning Giraffe is seen as an expression of the personal struggle of Salvador Dali with the civil war going on in his home country. The painting depicts two feminine figures with undefined phallic shapes protruding from their backs. The hands, forearms and face of the nearest figure are stripped down to the muscular tissue beneath the skin. Prominently, there are opened drawers protruding from the left leg and chest of the figurine.

The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee

Salvador Dali said that this painting was intended “to express for the first time in images Freud’s discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up.” It shows the sleeping figure of the artist’s wife Gala Dali floating above a rock. Beside her naked body, two drops of water, a pomegranate and a bee are also airborne. Gala’s dream is prompted by the buzzing of the bee and is portrayed in the upper half of the canvas.

The Great Masturbator

This canvas was created in the same year and is thought to reflect the erotic transformation that the artist underwent due to her arrival in his life. The main yellow area in the painting represents the artist himself sleeping. Out of his head comes the vision, probably representing an erotic fantasy, of a nude female figure, resembling his muse, drawn to the genitalia of a man, presumably the artist.

The Persistence of Memory

This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts a scene with watches melting slowly on rocks and the branch of a tree, with the ocean as a back drop. Dali uses the concept of hard and soft in this painting. This concept may be illustrated in a number of ways like the human mind moving from the softness of sleep to the hardness of reality. In his masterpiece, Dali uses melting watches and rocks to represent the soft and hard aspects of the world respectively.

Tuna-Fishing

This painting was created by Salvador Dali at the end of his illustrious career and is considered to be his last great masterpiece. He spent two summers to create the artwork in which, apart from surrealism, he has used styles such as Action painting, Pop Art, Pointillism, geometrical abstraction and psychedelic art. Including images from ancient Greek sculpture to modern cinema, Tuna Fishing depicts violent struggle between men and large fishes as a personification of the limited universe.