SALVADOR DALI - the man, the genius, the marvel

The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Salvador Dali is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. The Spanish painter was one of the best-known surrealist artists (artists who seek to express the contents of the unconscious mind). Blessed with an enormous talent for drawing, he painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise way.

His fiercely technical yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures and visionary explorations in film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression. From his personal life to his professional endeavors, he always took great risks and proved how rich the world can be when you dare to embrace pure, boundless creativity.

Salvador Dali

The artist, author, critic, impresario, and provocateur Salvador Dalí burst onto the art scene in 1929 and rarely left the public eye until his death six decades later. The auspicious occasion was the debut in Paris of Un Chien Andalou, a film Dalí made in collaboration with Luis Buñuel. Filmed in Paris, Un Chien Andalou strung together free-associative vignettes and made full use of the avant-garde technique of montage, including, most famously, a scene of a razor slicing into a woman’s eye. Shocking the viewer was his style and he made them feel his creation in their gut.

Diffidence was not in his vocabulary. “Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing,” he said in 1960, “but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time.” Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy, and early in his career exhibited a drawing, titled SacredHeart, that featured the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.” This meant that he had more than his own share of critics – art critic Robert Hughes dismissed Dalí’s later works as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale.” Dawn Ades of England’s University of Essex, a leading Dalí scholar felt “He had a reputation that was hard to salvage. I have had to work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.” Dalí’s antics, however, often obscured the genius.

Early childhood:

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech was born May 11, 1904, in the Catalonia n town of Figueres in northeastern Spain. His authoritarian father, Salvador Dalí Cusí, was a well-paid official with the authority to draw up legal documents. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferres, came from a family that designed and sold decorated fans, boxes and other art objects. Although she stopped working in the family business after marriage, she would amuse her young son by molding wax figurines out of colored candles, and she encouraged his creativity. But she was surely not prepared for his unique style. She died when he was 16 and that left him heartbroken.

Training:

The precocious Dalí was just 14 when his works were first exhibited, as part of a show in Figueres. Three years later, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid but, once there, felt there was more to learn about the latest currents in Paris from French art magazines than from his teachers, whom he believed were out of touch. When it came time for his year-end oral exam in art history at the academy, Dalí balked at the trio of examiners. “I am very sorry,” he declared, “but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well.” Add to this he was briefly imprisoned for political activities against the government. Academy officials had enough of him and expelled him without a diploma.

He was strongly influenced by the dreamlike works of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). He also experimented with cubism (a type of art in which objects are viewed in terms of geometry—the science of points, lines, and surfaces).

Surrealism and the Paranoic-Critical method

The Great Masturbator (1929)

The surrealists believed in artistic and political freedom to help free the imagination. Dali's first

contact with the movement was through seeing paintings; he then met other surrealist artists when he visited Paris, France, in 1928. Dali created some of his finest paintings in 1929. He introduced the Paranoic-Critical method in which he trained himself to possess the power to look at one object and "see" another. This did not apply only to painting; it meant that Dali could take a myth that was interpreted a certain way and impose upon it his own personal ideas. Thus he took surrealism to a whole new frontier where nobody had ever been before.

A key event in Dali's life during this time was meeting his wife, Gala, who was at that time married to another surrealist. She became his main influence, both in his personal life and in many of his paintings. Toward the end of the 1930s, Dali's exaggerated view of himself began to annoy others. André Breton (1896–1966), a French poet and critic who was a leading surrealist, angrily expelled Dali from the surrealist movement. Dali continued to be very successful in painting as well as in writing, stage design, and films, but his seriousness as an artist began to be questioned. Dali however became the most influential Surrealist artist; and perhaps the most renowned twentieth century painter after Pablo Picasso.

His famous works:

The most famous paintings of Salvador Dali include The Persistence of Memory, Galatea of the Spheres, The Great Masturbator, Swans reflecting elephants and Christ of Saint John of the Cross. 

The Great Masturbator is thought to reflect the erotic transformation that the artist underwent due to the arrival of his wife Gala in his life. 

Christ of Saint John of the Cross is based on a drawing by the 16th-century Spanish friar John of the

Galatea of the Spheres (1952)

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. This was voted Scotland’s favorite painting in a 2006 poll and it is considered by many to be the greatest religious painting of the twentieth century.

Galatea of the Spheres is one of the most renowned paintings from Dali’s Nuclear Mysticism period after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This painting is again a portrait of Gala Dali, her face is composed of densely populated spheres, representing atomic particles, which give a marvelous three dimensional effect to the canvas. 

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. 

Swans Reflecting Elephants is considered a landmark painting in Surrealism as it enhanced the popularity of the double-image style. It is the most famous double image created by Salvador Dali; his greatest masterpiece using the paranoiac-critical method; and one of the most well-known works in Surrealism. 

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)

The Persistence of Memory has been much analyzed over the years as Dali never explained his work. The melting watches have been thought to be an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time; as a symbol of mortality with the ants surrounding the watches representing decay; and as irrationality of dreams. 

There’s no better surreal imagery for Dalí than the equally bizarre tale of Alice in Wonderland. In 1969, Random House asked the artist to illustrate a limited edition of the Lewis Carroll classic and the results are as good are you’d think. Only 2,700 copies were created, but luckily a new reissue ensures that the work will live on.

His life inspired his work

When Dalí was 5 years old, his parent took him to his brother’s grave, a brother who died when he was not even born,  and told him that he was his brother’s reincarnation. It was a concept that Dalí himself believed, calling his deceased sibling “a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.” His older brother would become prominent in Dalí’s later work, like the 1963 Portrait of My Dead Brother.

While Dalí’s surreal artwork and eccentric behavior led many to believe that he was into drugs, he once famously stated, “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.” One way he kept himself in a dreamlike state included staring fixedly at a particular object until it transformed into another form, sparking a sort of hallucination.

The Burning Giraffe (1937)

Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, known as Gala, was ten years older than Dalí and married to Surrealist

poet Paul Éluard when she first met him in 1929. A love affair quickly developed, with Gala eventually divorcing Éluard—though they remained close. The couple married in a civil ceremony in 1934, despite Dalí’s family’s unease with him marrying an older Russian divorcee. She had a pivotal role in the artist’s career, becoming his business manager and muse but most importantly, a very vital inspiration for his creativity.

Fashion and jewelry designer

When we think of Vogue covers, photographs of supermodels come to mind. But Dalí created four covers for the legendary fashion magazine. He moonlighted as a fashion designer and worked closely with Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who created designs based on his artwork. In 1950, he collaborated with close friend Christian Dior on a project about fashion inspired by the future. Dalí’s contribution was “A dress for 2045.”

The Royal Heart is a dazzling masterpiece crafted from 18k gold and covered with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, two emeralds, and other precious gems. And that’s not the most impressive part. An internal mechanism causes The Royal Heart to beat as though it were a live human heart. The Royal Heart is the centerpiece of the Dalí-Joies collection now located at the Dalí Museum in Figueres, Spain.

Dali created his own museum

Dalí not only created his own museum, he’s also buried there. Located in his hometown of Figueres, the project started in the 1960s when the mayor of the small Catalan town asked Dalí to donate a piece of art to the city museum. Dalí decided to do much more than that, transforming the town’s theater—which was nearly destroyed during the Spanish Civil War—into the Dalí Theater and Museum.

The museum officially opened in 1974, but Dalí continued to expand the museum and even lived there during the final years of his life. After his death in 1989, he was buried under the stage of the theater. Today, the museum draws more than 1 million visitors a year, who flock to see the largest collection of Dalí’s artwork.