Salvador Dali
born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain
died Jan. 23, 1989, Figueras
in full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Y Domenech Spanish Surrealist painter and
printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery.
As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of
artistic styles and displayedunusual technical facility as a painter. It was not
until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of
his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the
erotic significance of subconscious imagery, and his affiliation with the Paris
Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater
reality” of man's subconscious over his reason. To bring up images from his
subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a
process he described as “paranoiac critical.”
Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary
rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings which made him the
world's best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dream world in which
commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a
bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous,
almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit
landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most
famous of these enigmatic images is “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), in which
limp, melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish
director Luis Bunuel, Dalí also made two Surrealistic films—Un Chien andalou
(1928; An Andalusian Dog ) and L'Age d'or (1930; The Golden Age)—that are
similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images.
In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more academic style under the
influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and as a consequence he was
expelled from the Surrealist movement. Thereafter he spent much of his time
designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry, as well as
exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United
States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970 Dalí
painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic
subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his
wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, these later
paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist's earlier works. The most
interesting and revealing of Dalí's books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
(1942–44).
