Salvador dalí

Salvador Dalí

Mad

or

Genius?

“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.”-Salvador Dali

Difficult childhood

• Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.

• Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier.• Dalí was told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came

to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "...[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections."

• Salvador's father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children. Salvador wouldn't tolerate his son's outbursts or eccentricities, and punished him severely.

• In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her...”. After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister.

Influential friends• In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in

Madrid. At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca.

Pepín Bello, García Lorca y Dalí in Madrid in 1924

• In 1926 he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Picasso, whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan Miró. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dalí made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró.

Joan Miró

Pablo Picasso

• Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant garde. His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer and Velázquez (from whom he adopted his signature curled moustache).

Diego Velázquez

Salv

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Dal

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• In August 1929, Dalí met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova.

• Amongst Dali's most famous friends was Freud. Indeed much of the surrealist movement can be paralleled with the work of Freud at that time. Psychoanalytic theory purported to explain and interpret dreams, hidden unconscious desires and the tapestry of symbolism thereof. This is the foundation of the surrealist movement.

Sigmund Freud

• Dali soon went into film and produced "Un chien d'andalou" (an Andalusian Dog) with Luis Buñuel, famous for its slitting of the eye image and the symbolic ants crawling out of the man's arm.

Luis Buñuel

French poster of the film

An image from Dalí's dream, part of the inspiration for the film.

Dalí's paranoiac critical method

Dalí's major contribution to the Surrealist Movementwas what he called the "paranoiac-critical method“, a mental exercise of accessing the subconscious toenhance artistic creativity.

Dalí would use the method to create a reality from his dreams and subconscious thoughts,thus mentally changing reality to what hewanted it to be and not necessarily what it was. For Dalí it became a way of life.

The idea was the use of double imagery in order to"...systematize confusion and contributeto the total discrediting of the world of reality".

First achievements

In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, “The Persistence of Memory”, which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of thework is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic.

This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, andthe other limp watches, shown being devoured by insects.

Dalí's heritageFrom 1960 to 1974, Salvador Dalí dedicated much of his time to creating the Dalí Teatro Museo(Theater-Museum) in Figueres, Spain. The museum was the former Municipal Theater where Dalíhad his public exhibition at the age of 14. The original 19th century structure was destroyed atthe end of the Spanish Civil War. Officially opened in 1974 the new structure, formed from theruins of the old, was based on Dalí's design.

The museum is billed as the World's largest Surrealist structure, containing a series of spaces that form a single artistic object where each element is an inextricable part of the whole. The museum houses the broadest range of works by the artist from his earliest artistic experiences to works of the last years of this life. Several works onpermanent display were created expressly for the museum.

Two wealthy American art collectors, A. Reynolds Morse and his wife Eleanor, who hadknown Dalí since 1942, set up an organization called "Friends of Dalí" and a foundation to put the artist on a more secure financial footing. The organization alsoestablished the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Salvador Dalí was born to be a genius. He memorized himself for many generations for his eccentric view on art and life as a whole.

He is the icon of surrealism, he made a great progress in this movement in art and earned the right to be called a genius, who had left behind a lot of mysteries for our contemporaries yet to

discover.

Most famous pieces of art by Salvador Dalíin chronological order

Early Period ( 1914-1926)

Landscape near Figueras (1910)

The Invisible Man(1929)

From Neo-Cubism to Early Surrealism( 1926-1929)

Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder (1933)

“I myself am surrealism” (1929-1934)

Face of Mae West ( 1934-1935)

“Paranoiac-critical method” (1934-1937)

Lobster Telephone( 1936)

The Face of War (1940)

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)

Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon (1941)

“The American Dream” ( 1938-1949)

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee (1943) Portrait of Picasso(1947)

Living Still Life (1956)

Galatea of the spheres (1952)

“Nuclear Mysticism” (1949-1962)

The Last Period ( 1963-1983)

The Three Glorious Enigmas of Gala (1982)

The en D

Resources

http://www.biography.com/people/salvador-dalí-40389#.UGlz4BEuG1M.delicious

http://www.edali.org/biography.jsp http://www.surrealists.co.uk/dali.php

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