SALVADOR DALİ

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5 Mar 2024

Who is Salvador Dali?

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, simply Salvador Dali, is known for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and striking and whimsical imagery in his work. Surrealist painter of Spanish Catalan origin is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He is best known for his 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory.”

Life of Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres Catalonia, Spain, as the second child of Salvador Dalí i Cusí and Felipa Domenech Ferres. The couple's first child, born in 1901, died of digestive inflammation on August 1, 1903, exactly nine months and 10 days before Dali's birth, and thus the name "Salvador" was passed on to the second child.

The Dali couple, who could not accept the death of their first child, often talked about his dead brother in the presence of young Dali and regularly visited the grave of the first Salvador with him. This led to Dali experiencing confusion about his identity at a young age. He later said about his brother, whom he never knew, “We looked like two drops of water, but our thoughts were different; “It was probably the first perfectly designed version of me,” she said.
Dali's father was a notary with a harsh and authoritarian character. On the contrary, Dali's mother was compassionate and understanding and supported her son's interest in painting. However, when Dali was three years old, his sister Ana Maria was born. Dali, the only son of the house who constantly attracted the attention of his mother, sister, aunt, grandmother and caregiver, began to display a spoiled and capricious character from an early age.

In 1916, he started painting school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas Instituto in Figueres, Spain. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream and stand out as the eccentric of the class, attracting all attention with his strange clothes and long hair. While vacationing with her family in Cadaques after her first year at art school, she met Ramon Pichot, a local artist who frequently visited Paris, and discovered modern painting. The following year, his father organized an exhibition of Dali's charcoal drawings in the family home. In 1919 the young artist opened his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater of Figueres.

In February 1921, his mother passed away due to breast cancer and Dali was only 16 years old. She later said that her mother's death was the biggest trauma she had experienced in her life. Dali's father married his wife's sister after his death. Dali was not angry with this marriage because he had great love and respect for his aunt. In the process, he convinced his father that he could make a living as an artist and received permission to go to Madrid, Spain, to study painting. Dali, who moved to Madrid in 1922 and enrolled in school there, was strongly influenced by the dreamlike works of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, and showed the influences of cubism and Dadaism in his work during this period. These new trends originating from France and Switzerland were not very common in Madrid at that time, and Dali's works quickly attracted attention.

Two events in the 1920s led to the development of his mature artistic style: the first was his discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic significance of subconscious images. Deeply influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic studies, Dali turned to producing works in which he tried to access the subconscious. In the 1930s, Dali invented the “paranoid critical method” and began using the subconscious and hallucinations to unlock his inner creativity and imagination. After entering this self-imposed delirium, Dali achieved the hallucinatory images he visualized by painting unrelated images side by side. Constantly applying this method to his art and other aspects of his life, Dali aimed to reach the peak of his creativity and transform this creativity into exemplary works of art.

Another event that influenced Dali was his association with the Paris surrealists, a group of artists and writers. During the years he spent in Madrid, he became close friends with filmmaker Luis Buñuel and poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who were also fond of avant-garde art. Temporarily suspended from school in 1923 for lack of discipline, Dali was briefly imprisoned the same year for his political activities against the government in Girona and was ultimately expelled from the art school. He returned to school in 1925 and had his first solo exhibition in Barcelona. His paintings were met with interest and surprise by critics.

Dali went to Paris in 1926 and met Pablo Picasso, whom he respected very much. Over the next few years the Picasso influence would dominate Dali's work. Shortly after returning from a trip to Paris, Dalí was permanently expelled from his school and soon enlisted in the military. He finished his military service in October 1927, and in March 1928, together with art critics Luís Montanyà and Sebastià Gasch, he wrote the “Anti-Art Catalan Manifesto,” advocating modernism and futurism in art.

Salvador Dali's Art Life

From 1929 to 1937, Salvador Dali produced paintings that made him the world's best-known surrealist artist. It depicted a dream world in which ordinary objects were juxtaposed, distorted, or otherwise metamorphosed in strange and illogical ways. Dali reproduced these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail, often setting them in bleak and sunny landscapes reminiscent of his native Catalonia.

In 1929, he shot an avant-garde short film with his friend, Spanish director Luis Buñuel, called “An Andalusian Dog”, full of grotesque but extremely thought-provoking images. This film made the duo famous in surrealist art circles. In 1931, Dali painted his most famous work, “The Persistance of Memory.” Also known as “The Persistence of Memory” or “The Melting Clocks”, this work depicts pocket watches melting in front of a wide seaside view and is often interpreted as a protest against the rigid and immutable concept of time. Dali later said that this painting was inspired by a Camembert cheese melting in the hot August sun.

In December 1936, Dali participated in the “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and opened a personal exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Both exhibitions were well attended and received extensive press coverage.
In addition to being inspired by names such as Picasso and Freud, Dalí was also greatly influenced by nature and animals. He made use of various sources and symbolism and frequently included both figurative and abstract animal paintings in his works.

Dalí started living in Catalonia with Gala from 1949. In 1951 he published the Mystical Manifesto, in which he synthesized some Catholic and modern scientific concepts. II. His post-World War II work would feature Catholic themes and modern science concepts such as DNA, the hypercube (four-dimensional cube), and atomic dissolution. Dalí, who was greatly impressed by the power of the atomic bomb exploding in Hiroshima, called this period of his life "nuclear mysticism". During this period, Dalí experimented with many different techniques, such as paint splatters on canvas, holograms and optical illusions.

In 1960, the mayor of Figueres decided to restore the Municipal Theatre, which hosted Dalí's first exhibition many years ago and was damaged by the civil war under the name “Salvador Dali Theater and Museum”. Dalí was personally involved in the construction and decoration of the museum until 1974 and devoted a lot of time and effort to this project. Although the museum opened in 1974, Dalí continued to make minor additions and changes until the mid-1980s.

In addition to painting, Dali was also interested in sculpture, photography and filmmaking, and the short cartoon called Destino, which he made together with American animator Walt Disney, was nominated for an Academy Award in the "Best Animated Short Film" category in 2003.

Salvador Dali and Gala

In 1929, Dali met his great love, Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova, aka “Gala”. Elena was 10 years older than Dali and was married to the poet Paul Eluard and had one child when they met in 1929. She was also the lover of Max Ernst, who painted her in a series of portraits. Dali and Gala fell in love at first sight, Gala left her husband for Dali. Dali wrote of Gala in his “Secret Life” : “She would be my destiny, my victory, my wife Gradiva.”

The name Gradiva came from W. Jensen's novel. Gradiva, the hero of the book, brought psychological healing to the main character. Dali and Gala started living together in 1929 and got married in 1934. Gala became the primary inspiration for his art. She also managed Dali's art deals and financial affairs.

In 1940, Dali and Gala escaped from World War II and settled in the USA. In the United States, where he lived for nine years, he spent much of his time designing theater sets, fashion store interiors, and jewelry, as well as showcasing his genius for lavish shows. On June 10, 1982, Gala, Dalí's beloved wife, manager, model and muse, died. Dali lost his will to live after Gala's death, and the loss of his soul mate shook the artist so deeply that it affected his will to live.

Salvador Dali's Most Important Works and Their Meanings

Salvador Dali, “The Great Masturbator”; 1929

This work by Dali, painted in 1929, is an example of his surrealist era. In this painting full of veiled symbolism, curvy melting lines and faces, Dali's fears, personal anxieties, persistent obsessions, that is, his innermost conflicts, are revealed, revealing a dream world he created for the purpose of self-discovery.

At the center of the painting we see a distorted human face looking downwards, following the shape of a natural rock formation at Cap de Creus on the sea coast of Catalonia. This face dominates most of the picture. A female figure rises from this huge face, her eyes closed and her nose balanced precariously on the ground. Just below the female body, a white lily is depicted, and next to it, a male figure is depicted only from the waist down. There are fresh and still bleeding cuts on the figure's legs. The woman's mouth is positioned to face the male genital organ. This woman is said to be Dali's great love, Gala, and is one of the artist's several personas, reflecting the spiritual and erotic transformation he underwent as a result of Gala's appearance in his life. On the other hand, there is a dead grasshopper just below the portrait. The grasshopper is thought to represent Dali's obsession with large insects. The ants wandering around the belly of the grasshopper are moving upwards upside down. Based on the fact that Dalí was afraid of insects, it can be concluded that he depicted losing control.

This distinctive variety of imagery and his one-of-a-kind paranoid critical commentary appeared again and again in his future paintings. For example, we can clearly see this imagery in his iconic masterpiece “ The Persistence of Memory” . The work is currently exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Salvador Dali, “The Persistance of Memory”; 1931

“The Persistence of Memory”, or better known as “The Melting Clocks”, dated 1931, is one of the most well-known works of both Dali and the surrealism movement. A year before painting this painting, Dali developed his own approach to art, formulating his “paranoid critical method”. This method, relying on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations to facilitate a work of art, was particularly influential in the creation of Dali's hand-painted dream photographs, a collection of works grounded in realism in style but unrealistic in subject matter.

“The Persistence of Memory”, on the one hand, is inspired by a Camembert cheese melting in the hot August sun, as Dali puts it, and on the other hand, it is based on a childhood event that Dali obtained through the Paranoid-Critical Method process. In other words, it is a “rediscovered” memory. At the center of the work lies a strange but completely non-humanoid figure. It is believed that this figure is a representation of Dali himself, who painted him with one eye closed and the other open to indicate a dream state.

The work was donated to the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1934 by a donor who wished to remain anonymous. It is still exhibited at MoMA today.

Salvador Dali ,”The Metamorphosis of Narcissus” (Narcissus’un Metamorfozu); 1937

“The Metamorphosis of Narcissus” is the first painting that Dali painted entirely in accordance with the “paranoid critical method”. Dali defined this method as the "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge" based on the critical-interpretive relationship of the phenomenon of delirium.

It tells the story of Narcissus, also known as Narcissus in Greek mythology, who, after seeing his own image reflected in a pool, was so amazed that he could not look at himself and eventually disappeared. In the center of the painting, he placed a group of men, one of Narcissus's rejected suitors. On the left side of the canvas, the figure of Narcissus squatting by a lake leans his head on his knee and holds an egg reflecting the shape of his body with his stone hand on his right, while a narcissus flower sprouted from the broken egg.

Just like in the painting “Swans Reflecting Elephants”, to create the double image seen in this painting, Dali again used the reflection in a lake and used a meticulous technique that he described as “hand-painted color photography” to depict with a hallucinatory effect the Narcissus kneeling in the pool turning into a hand holding the egg and the flower. He used technique. Today it is exhibited in the Tate Modern Museum in London.

Salvador Dali, “Swans Reflecting Elephants”; 1937

This work was made in 1937 and is one of the pioneers of Dali's paranoid critical period. The work, made using oil paint on canvas, is one of Dali's famous double paintings. These double images are an important part of Dali's "paranoid-critical method", which he put forward in his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational". Describing the process as “a method of spontaneous irrational understanding based on the interpretive critical association of crazy phenomena,” Dali frequently used this method in the thirties to reveal the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings.

Here we see three swans in front of dull leafless trees reflected in the lake, so that the heads of the swans become the heads of the elephants, and the trees become the trunks of the elephants. In the background of the painting, a Catalonian landscape depicted with fiery autumn colors and brushwork creating curves on the cliffs surrounding the lake contrast with the stillness of the water. The male figure standing with his back turned on the left side of the painting is said to be a self-portrait of Dali, who painted himself facing away from the rest of the image because he was frustrated with the direction of the surrealism movement. On the other hand, it is also claimed that this figure is Dali's close friend Marcel Duchamp.

Salvador Dali, “The Burning Giraffe”; 1937

Dali painted “Burning Giraffe” between 1940 and 1948, before his exile in the United States. This painting shows his personal struggle with the war in his hometown. This phenomenal work, which Dali later described as “femme-coccyx /tailbone woman”, can be based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic method.

In the foreground there is a female figure with drawers that open from the side like a chest. The opened drawers in this enormous female figure refer to the human subconscious. Dali described this imagination as "a kind of allegory that serves to follow the countless narcissistic smells rising from each of our drawers and to show a certain insight."

Both the women in the front and the back also have undefined shapes protruding from their backs, supported by crutches-like objects. The hands, arms and face of the figure in the front are stripped down to the muscle tissue beneath the skin. The figure in the back is holding a strip of meat in his hand. In this work, where we clearly see the contrast between the deep blue sky and the twilight atmosphere, the giraffe figure, which is quite small compared to the rest of the painting, is depicted with its back burning. Dali, who first used the image of a burning giraffe in the 1930 film L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age), frequently included the giraffe figure in his works in the following years. The giraffe, symbolized as a totem animal for Dali, is the "masculine cosmic apocalypse monster" and a premonition of war.

Salvador Dali, “Ballerina In A Death's Head”; 1939

This painting is one of the examples of the paranoid critical method that Dali developed in order to influence his hero Sigmund Freud. What most interested Dali, who defined this method as “the method of spontaneous irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of associations and interpretations of crazy phenomena,” is the aspect of paranoia and the brain's ability to perceive connections between things that are not rationally connected.

Using the method when creating a work of art, just like in “Swans Reflecting Elephants” or “The Great Mastrubator,” used an active mental process to visualize the images in the work and incorporate them into the final product, as an example of the resulting work, where an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways. It has created a pair of images that can be interpreted.

Salvador Dali, “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (The Temptation of St. Antony); 1946

Painted in 1946, “The Temptation of St. Antony” is a precursor to Dali's works generally known as the “classical period” or “Dali Renaissance”. As the name suggests, this painting depicts the series of supernatural events encountered by the Christian monk St. Anthony the Great during his Egyptian desert pilgrimage.

Another important aspect of this painting is that it was the first and last time Dali painted for a competition throughout his artistic life. In 1946, an artistic competition on the charm of Saint Anthony was organized by a production company called Loew Lewin Company, and 11 painters, including Dali, Paul Delaux and Max Ernst, participated in this competition; The winner of the award was Max Ernst.