BIOGRAPHY

Salvador Dalí was born in Spain on May 11, 1904 and went on to become one of the most famous Spanish artists ever and, perhaps more importantly, the most famous and most influential of the surrealist painters. His childhood was marked by intense emotional experiences that would later manifest themselves in his Surrealist works. In 1921, Dalí enrolled in the National School of the Arts in Madrid, where he perfected his technical virtuosity by emulating Dutch still-life artists among others. In 1926, Dalís turbulent career at school was abruptly ended after his expulsion. During this time, he began exhibiting his paintings in Madrid and Barcelona, his style still vacillating among the dominant styles of the day: realism, cubism and neoclassicism.

In 1928, Dalí moved to Paris where he met fellow Spaniard Joan Miró and other influential members of the Surrealist movement. At this time, Dalí began to paint with his own distinct personal style that would be present in his works to come. This style combined used a minutely detailed realism to depict dream and hallucinatory images.

The painting Dismal Sport was Dalí's first official Surrealist painting. This painting also led to his introduction and later marriage to Gala Eluard. It is said that Eluard cured Dalí of his hysteria and the sexual impotence expressed in this painting. Dalí painted her repeatedly throughout his career and she became a vehicle for his visual experimentation.

In 1949, Dalí painted his first religious work, the Madonna of Port-Lligat. During this period in his life, he became interested not only in painting religious scenes, but also in the traditional techniques of such masters as Raphael and Vermeer.

It is important to note that Dalí was not only interested in painting. He also designed jewelry, furniture, and theatrical sets and costumes. In fact, between 1929 and 1931, Dalí collaborated with a well known film-maker Luis Buñuel to direct two surrealist films, Un Chien andalou(An andalusian dog) and L'Age d'or (The Golden Age). He has aslo written two autobiographies, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí and Diary of a Genius.

Many critics criticized him in the latter part of his life for being too susceptible to fads and trends, but when Dalí died on January 23, 1989, the world felt the loss of this great surrealist artist.

ARTISTIC GENRE

In particular, Dalí developed his own surrealist method called the paranoiac-critical method. In this method, Dalí exploited the shock value of combining the mechanistic with the obscene, convulsed, and tortured. The development of this method was responsible for the famous double images seen in many of Dalí's works. This method required the artist to perceive and paint different images within a single collection of shapes. Dalí envisioned this technique as a means of destabilizing the world, believing that everything the viewer saw was potentially something else and that everything had multiple meanings. The dependence of this method on the multiplicity of meanings owed much to Sigmund Freud's analyses of dreams. Freud believed that dreams were a representation or expression of subconscious thoughts and desires, where the object in the dream often represented something else.

One classic example of the theme of one object representing another comes in the form of Metamorphosis of Narcissus, one of Dalí's most famous paintings. In it, he linked the Freudian implications of the paranoiac-critical method to its Surrealist application. For the viewer of the painting, metamorphosis occurs as he or she accepts an invitation to visual exchange offered in the painting and notices that the fossil hand-and-egg shape mirrors that of the staring Narcissus in the background. In this painting, the viewer is drawn into the most creative moment of simulated paranoia, the realization that one thing looks like another, and is drawn into the world of Surrealist possibility.

PAINTINGS