Salvador Dali, in full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech, (born May 11, 1904 in Figueras, Spain; died January 23, 1989 in Figueras), Spanish surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of imagery subconscious.
Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Dali received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a very young age, he found himself increasingly drawn to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He approached surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents.
Dali’s artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design, and photography, sometimes in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays, and criticism. The main themes of his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships.
The most famous works of art by Salvador Dali:
1. The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Hard objects become inexplicably limp in this bleak and endless dreamscape, while metal attracts ants like rotten meat. Mastering what he called “the usual paralyzing tricks of tricking the eyes,” Dali painted with “the most imperialistic fury of precision,” he said, but only “to systematize the confusion and thus help to discredit the world of reality altogether.” . It’s classic surreal ambition, but a literal reality is also included: the distant golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia, Dali’s home.
Those limp watches are as soft as overripe cheese; in fact, they represent “the camembert of time”, in Dali’s phrase. Here time must lose all meaning. Permanence goes with it: ants, a common theme in Dali’s work, represent decay, particularly when attacking a gold watch, and appear grotesquely organic. The monstrous fleshy creature that covers the center of the painting is both strange and familiar: an approximation of Dali’s own face in profile, its long lashes eerily appearing insect-like or even sexual, like what may or may not be a tongue oozing from his nose like a fat snail.
2. Swans that are reflected as elephants (1937)
Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) belongs to Dali’s paranoid critical period. Painted in oil on canvas, it contains one of Dali’s famous double images. Double images were an important part of Dali’s “critical method of paranoia”, which he presented in his 1935 essay “The Conquest of the Irrational”. He explained his process as a “spontaneous method of irrational understanding based on the interpretive critical association of delusional phenomena.” Dali used this method to bring out the hallucinatory forms, double images, and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the 1930s.
3. Soft construction with boiled beans (1936)
This painting expresses the destruction during the Spanish Civil War. The monstrous creature in this painting is self-destructive just like a Civil War. This painting is not intended to represent the choice of sides, although Dali had many reasons for choosing sides in the Spanish Civil War. His sister was tortured and imprisoned by communist soldiers fighting for the Republic and his good friend from art school, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, was assassinated by a fascist firing squad. Dali also made this painting look very realistic, and yet he continued to bring surreal concepts.
Although humans do not have the potential to resemble the creatures in this painting, it retains a realistic feel, reminding the viewer of the gravity of the ideas behind it. Dali also brought ideas of tradition to this piece with a beautiful Catalan sky, creating a contrast with the idea of revolution. There is a significant amount of boiled beans in this painting. Dali is quoted as saying that the reason he included boiled beans was “one could not imagine swallowing all that mindless meat without the presence of some melancholy mealy vegetable.” By this he meant that there were many difficulties in the war so that the Spanish citizens had to do everything possible to deal with their problems. He played with themes of love, food and war and how they are related.
4. The Great Masturbator (1929)
A nude female figure (resembling Dali’s then-new muse Gala) rises from the back of the head; this may be the masturbatory fantasy suggested by the title. The woman’s mouth is close to a finely clad male crotch, a suggestion that fellatio may be taking place. The male figure seen only from the waist down has fresh, bleeding cuts on her knees. Beneath the head in the central profile, in its mouth, is a grasshopper, an insect that Dali referred to several times in his writings. A swarm of ants (a popular motif representing sexual anxiety in Dali’s work) accumulates on the grasshopper’s abdomen, as well as on its outstretched face.
The painting may represent Dali’s severely conflicting attitudes towards sexual relations. In Dali’s youth, his father had left behind a book with explicit photos of people suffering from untreated advanced venereal disease to “educate” the boy. Photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified the young Dali, who continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood.
5. Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
This painting is Dali’s interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narciso was a young man of great beauty who loved only himself and broke the hearts of many of his lovers. The gods punished him by letting him see his own reflection in a pond. She fell in love with him, but found that she couldn’t hold him and died of frustration. Immortalized, the gods immortalized him as the daffodil flower (narcissus). For this image, Dali used a meticulous technique that he described as ‘hand-painted color photography’ to render with hallucinatory effect the transformation of Narcissus, kneeling in the pool, into the hand holding the egg and flower. Narcissus as he was before his transformation is seen posing in the background. The game with ‘double images’ arose from Dali’s fascination with hallucination and deception.
6. Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before waking up (1944)
In this “hand-painted dream photograph”, as Dali often calls his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, in the middle of which Gala is the protagonist of the scene. Next to the naked body of the sleeping woman, who levitates on a flat rock floating on the sea, Dali depicts two suspended drops of water and a pomegranate, a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. A bee flies over the pomegranate, an insect that traditionally symbolizes the Virgin.
7. Giraffe on Fire (1937)
Dali painted Burning Giraffe prior to his exile in the United States from 1940 to 1948. Although Dali declared himself apolitical – “I am Dali, and only that” – this painting shows his personal struggle with the battle in his home country. Characteristic are the open drawers on the blue female figure, which Dali described at a later date as “Femme-coccyx” (woman with the tail).
This phenomenon goes back to the psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud, much admired by Dali. He considered it a huge step forward for civilization, as shown in the following quote. “The only difference between immortal Greece and our era is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, which in Greek times was merely Neoplatonic, is now full of secret drawers that can only be opened through psychoanalysis.” The open drawers in this expressive propped up female figure refer to the man’s inner subconscious. In Dali’s own words, his paintings form “a kind of allegory that serves to illustrate a certain intuition, to follow the numerous narcissistic odors that rise from each of our drawers”.
8. Mae West Lips Sofa (1937)
In 1935 Salvador Dali, possibly the most famous of the Surrealist artists of the time, met a kindred spirit in the British collector and poet Edward James. James was Britain’s most distinguished supporter of the Surrealist movement, and the pair struck up a deep friendship, and James became a collector of Dali’s work. In 1936, Dali stayed with James at his London home, where they developed a series of ideas for Surrealist objects and furniture. It was James who suggested that they create a sofa based on Dali’s work, Mae West’s Face That Can Be Used as a Surreal Apartment (1934-35), which sees the scarlet lips of Hollywood sex symbol Mae West reimagined as a seat for a setting. fantastic.
9. Lobster Telephone (1936)
This is a classic example of a surreal object, made from the conjunction of elements not normally associated with each other, resulting in something both playful and threatening. Dali believed that such objects could reveal the secret desires of the unconscious. Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dali. The telephone appears in certain late 1930s paintings such as Mountain Lake (Tate Gallery T01979), and the lobster appears in drawings and designs, usually associated with erotic pleasure and pain. For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Dali created a multimedia experience titled The Dream of Venus, which consisted in part of dressing live nude models in ‘costumes’ made of fresh shellfish, an event photographed by Horst P. Horst and George Platt. lynes. The artist used a lobster to cover the female sexual organs of his models. Dali often drew a close analogy between food and sex. In Lobster Telephone, the crustacean’s tail, where its sexual parts are located, is placed directly over the mouthpiece.
10. Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)
It depicts Jesus Christ on the cross in a darkened sky floating over a body of water complete with a boat and fishermen. Although it is a representation of the crucifixion, it is devoid of nails, blood, and a crown of thorns, because, according to Dali, he was convinced by a dream that these features would mar his representation of Christ. Also in a dream, it was revealed to him the importance of depicting Christ at the extreme angle evident in the painting.
