Searching for Dali
“I don't do drugs. I am drugs “(Salvador Dali). This
quote mentioned by Dali, is well known by the society and gives a clue of the
personality he used to have. A crazy, different, unique, strong and confident
personality. Salvador Dali is one of the most famous artists that have ever
existed. His unique personality and creativity led him to create awesome art
pieces that today are well known all over the world. I got interested in this
topic since the day I got the privilege to see one of his art pieces at a
museum. I really liked his way of transmitting emotions through a painting.
Before researching about him, I felt that if I really like his paintings I
should know some background about him and these pieces.
At the beginning
of this research, I only knew some of his art pieces and some facts of his
life. But during research I realized there is a lot of interesting facts about
his life that I was missing. He influenced a lot of people mostly artists
during their career. I really looked forward in searching for the art pieces he
realized and his influence in Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Metaphysical
painting. Also what he wanted to show in each one, the message he wanted to
transmit.
I found a lot of useful information; most of it was
biographies. Since I had many places to choose information from, I decided to
take pieces and main ideas of information from the different websites and
created a biography with this. This was useful since there wasn’t a website
that had them all. I also looked at books for information but I could only find
his biography and some paintings at an encyclopedia.
EBSCO, a resource school gave us, was a really useful
resource; I found most of the biography of Salvador Dali there, also some of
his paintings. I found it a helpful source for finding information since it is
opened to many options of research.
Brain Quote was a useful website too. There, I found most of the famous
quotes from Dali like the following: “I do not paint a portrait to look like
the subject; rather does the person grow to look like his portrait” (Salvador
Dali). This quote shows how a big character is Salvador and the strong
confidence he has for himself.
Who
is Dali?
Salvador Domnigo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech,
recognized better as Salvador Dali, was a Spanish painter. But he also made
important contributions as a sculptor, graphic artist, and as a designer.
He was born on May 11, 1904 in Girona, son of Salvador
Dalí Cusí and his wife Felipa Domenech Ferres. Years later his sister Anna
Maria was born. The first school Salvador attended to didn’t work, so he went
to a Hispano-French school and learned French. Salvador started to get
interested in art when he spent time at the Molí de la Torre, a building owned
by a family of artists. There the discovered impressionism. Later he attended
to a Drawing school at his home town. Since Dali was more into art, he became
part of an exhibition at the municipal theater (that later became the Dalí
Theater-Museum.
He and some of his friends founded a magazine, in which
he published personal impressions and private memories. His father made a
condition so Dalí could become a painter; he had to go to Madrid at the Fine
Arts School. And Dalí accepted to do so.
His mother died at 1921, and the following year his
father married Catalina Domenech, the deceased woman´s sister. At Madrid,
Salvador got several awards and attended to the Special Painting, Sculpture and
Engraving School (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando). He got
expelled from the school and went back to Figueres. There, his first art
professor teached him the technique of etching. Salvador really wanted to
return to the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School, so he did, but
repeating the year.
After participating in several exhibitions, he went to
Paris where he met Picasso and visited the Louvre Museum. Years later he
decided to really devote on painting.
At the beginning he was in the areas of Cubism, Futurism,
and Metaphysical Painting. And at 1992, he joined the surrealists. Surrealism
features a theme of an element of surprise, the unknown. This cultural movement
is known for its visual art works and started World War I at Paris.
Salvador’s art
flourished during this surrealist age. He took the concept of surrealism and
transformed it into a more positive method, which he named it as “critical
paranoia”. His paintings had a lot of creativity, he claimed that eccentricity
and exhibitionism where the source of his creative energy. Dali claimed that
this method he transformed should be only used in artistic and poetical
creation, but also in the affairs of daily life. Most of his paintings used an unreal
dream-like technique, where hallucinatory characters contributed to his
imagery.
Salvador Dali said, “The secret of my influence has
always been that it remained secret” (Brainy quote). When it comes to Dali’s point of view of his
paintings, he thought of them as a “hand painted dream photographs”. And his
favorite characters and images he used where human figures with half open drawers,
burning giraffes, and watches that bent as if made of wax; but these where just
some of them.
Salvador adopted a more traditional style when he visited
Italy in 1937. This and political views made him leave the Surrealist ranks.
His output also included book illustration, jewelry design, and work for the
theatre. With collaboration of luis Buñuel he made his first surrealis films:
Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930). He also contributed a dream
sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He wrote a novel named hidden
faces (1944) and volumes of his autobiography. There are some museums devoted
to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in
Florida. ("Salvador Dali BiographyÂ
.")
The persistence of Memory (La persistència de la
memòria)
The persistence of memory is considered the most famous
art piece of Salvador Dali finished at 1931, or as many people recognize it,
“the painting with the melted watches”. This painting is recently found in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
It portrays a fetus-like head lying on the ground, like a
fish that was washed ashore and now decaying after a lost struggle. There are
also four pocket watches in this painting, three of which appear to be molten,
as if made out of cheese. And the fourth watch is in a normal state. The
drooping watches possible show the irrelevance of time during sleep, as some
people think. Some historians come to the conclusion that the painting may be
an idea of Einstein's theory of relativity: that time it is relative and not
fixed.
Another aspect and detail that is not easy to spot at
first sight is the way Dali uses light to communicate the ideas of his
painting. The persistence of memory makes the viewer look at consciousness as
“the light at the end of the tunnel”. ("Famous paintings bySalvador
DalÃ.")
Dali would make ridiculous and silly explanations for his
paintings to mislead people. And this painting is an example of it. By doing
this Dali not only opened the doors for discussion for many interpretations of
his art, but also made nearly impossible for people to understand and criticize
his work he thought has less intellect than himself. Another example of this
and with the same intentions is Leonardo DaVinci, when he wrote backwards and
upside down in his journals, so his work could only be read when looked at a
mirror’s reflection.
