Salvador Dali

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~Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquess of Dalí de Púbol - born on 11 May 1904

died on 23 January 1989.

~Spanish surrealist artist

~Born in Figueres, Catalonia - received his formal education in fine arts at Madrid.

~Known for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

~Also known for his look ( curled mustache) and the fact that it is rare to find a normal photo of him. In most pictures his yes look like they are ready to pop off.

Dali's Work

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~Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age, he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements.

He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s.

~Dalí's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design and photography.

He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays and criticism.

Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships.

Dali's Work

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~He was haunted by the idea of his dead brother throughout his life, mythologizing him in his writings and art.

~He was not a drug user and did not use any chemicals to induce his hallucinations.

He actually managed to maintain his dream-like state by fixating on a specific object until it transformed into something else.

~A method he used - going to sleep in a chair holding a spoon above a tin plate. When he dozed off, he'd drop the spoon onto the plate and the noise would startle him awake and enable him to write down what he saw in his dreams.

Dali's most famous work is The Persistence of Memory (1931)

He used a technique which he called his "paranoiac-critical method." He would basically try to put himself into a state of psychosis and use his hallucinations to create "hand-painted dream photographs".

The dripping watches and deformed face in this painting certainly look like an unalloyed expression of the subconscious.

Some have suggested that the watches refer to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Though Dalí denied this, citing, instead a Camembert cheese he had seen melt in the sun as the inspiration for this central motif.

Many commentators have interpreted Dalí’s ants, a recurrent theme in his paintings, which can seen on the face of one of the painting’s pocket watches, as a symbol for decay. Others have suggested that the deformed face in the centre is some kind of self-portrait.

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The title of the picture, too, offers some keys, as does the simple, technical challenges presented in such a composition. It is not unreasonable to associate the watches in The Persistence of Memory with ideas about the passage of time and the relation between actual time and remembered time.

Other famous works of him are :

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The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946)

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Galatea of the spheres ( 1952 )

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Living still life (1956)

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Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)

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Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)

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"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

- Salvador Dali

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