Salvador Dali: Surrealist Painter

Salvador Dali
Biography, Paintings: Spanish Surrealist Painter, Leader of Surrealism Movement and Founder Of 'Critical Paranoia'.
Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art - HOMEPAGE

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali, the eccentric but exceptionally imaginative Spanish artist, was originally a Cubist but then became the best known and foremost exponent of the surrealism school of painting, being renowned for the vivid and bizarre content of his pictures. The word 'daliesque' has become synonymous with surrealism. In addition to his painting skills, which were strongly influenced by the Old Masters of the Italian Renaissance, his creative talents extended to film, sculpture, and photography.

The Persistence of Memory (1931)

As a surrealist, Dali emphasized the idea of absurdity and the role of the unconscious in his art. His waxed moustache, general eccentricity and self-promotion accorded him wide public recognition and significant commercial success during his lifetime.

Among his best known works of art, are: The Persistence of Memory (1931), Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954). The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) is probably Dalí's most famous oil painting. The picture introduced his image of the soft melting pocket watch - reality being nothing but the Camembert cheese of space and time - and epitomised the artist's notion of of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking of the time.

Detail from the Persistence of Memory

This clock-imagery can be seen as a visual representation of Einstein's theory of Relativity, showing how gravity affects and distorts time.

Dali's Surrealism involved inducing hallucinatory states in himself in order to produce images from his subconscious mind. This process he called "critical paranoia". Dali's paintings portray a hallucinatory reality usually contradicted by the images in his compositions.

Once Dali hit upon this method, his style of fine art painting matured with extraordinary rapidity and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best known Surrealist painter. His pictures portray a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dali portrayed these objects in meticulous detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936)

His oil painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans is a powerful picture which depicts a grimacing dismembered figure (symbolic of war-torn humanity) grasping upward at itself while holding itself down underfoot. The monstrous face recalls the mythological legend of Saturn devouring one of his children, as previously depicted by Goya. The boiled beans may represent the ancient Catalan offering to the gods. Dalí described it as a 'premonition of civil war' and began it six months before the Spanish Civil War started.

In the late 1930s Dali switched to a more academic style of painting, under the influence of the Renaissance Italian master Raphael, and as a consequence was expelled from the Surrealistic movement by André Breton in 1937.

The Disintegration of the
Persistence of Memory (1952-4)

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During the period 1950 to 1970, Salvador Dali painted many works with scientific, religious and mythological themes, although these artworks are not as highly regarded as his earlier paintings. This negative reaction by art critics may have been influenced by political considerations (Dali returned to Spain to live under Franco) and also by the increasingly eccentric behaviour of Dali himself. Nevertheless, some paintings remain important, such as The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) which was Dalí's way of acknowledging the impact of the the new science of physics.

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, (La desintegración de la persistencia de la memoria) is a re-creation of Dalí's famous 1931 work The Persistence of Memory, and measures a mere 9 inches by 13 inches. It shows his earlier work fragmented into smaller component elements - mainly blocks - with gaps between them, implying something beneath the surface of the first work. The new imagery represents the uncertain effects of the new atomic bomb on science and humanity.

Despite the critics, Salvador Dali remained a strong influence on other avant-garde artists. In his later years, young painters like Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important influence on pop art.

While remaining a bizarre, elusive individual, Salvador Dali's paintings continue to fascinate. He was a unique painter, and remains a significant figure in the history of art. His works hang in the best art museums across the world.

• For more biographies of great painters, see: Famous Artists.
• For information about famous sculptors and painters in Ireland, see: Irish Visual Art Encyclopedia.