Salvador Dali!
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Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dali had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved Salvador Dali's art as much as it annoyed Salvador Dali's critics, since Salvador Dali's eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than Salvador Dali's artwork.
Salvador Dali Early life
Dali was born on May 11, 1904, at 8.45 am local time in the town of Figueres, in the Empord' region close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dali's older brother, also named Salvador, had died of meningitis three years earlier at the age of 7. Salvador Dali's father, Salvador Dali i Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinarian approach was tempered by Salvador Dali's wife, Felipa Domenech Ferres, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When Salvador Dali was five, Dali was taken to Salvador Dali's brother's grave and told by Salvador Dali's parents that Salvador Dali was Salvador Dali's brother's Reincarnation, which Salvador Dali came to believe. Of Salvador Dali's brother, Dali said: "my brother died at the age of seven from an attack of meningitis, three years before I was born...we resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." Salvador Dali "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."Dali also had a sister, Ana Maria, who was three years Salvador Dali's junior. In 1949 she published a book about her brother, Dali As Seen By Salvador Dali's Sister.
Dali attended drawing school, where Salvador Dali first received formal art training. In 1916, Dali discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqu's (in the nearby Costa Brava) with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dali's father organized an exhibition of Salvador Dali's charcoal drawings in their family home. Salvador Dali had Salvador Dali's first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919. In 1921, Dali's mother died of breast cancer when Salvador Dali was sixteen years old. Salvador Dali's mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her...I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dali's father married the sister of Salvador Dali's deceased wife; Dali somewhat resented this marriage.
Salvador Dali Madrid and Paris
Dali with fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van VechtenIn 1922, Dali moved into the Residencia de estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and there studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. Dali already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee breeches in the fashion style of a century earlier. But Salvador Dali's paintings, where Salvador Dali experimented with Cubism, earned Salvador Dali the most attention from Salvador Dali's fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, Salvador Dali probably did not completely understand the movement, since Salvador Dali's only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalogue given to Salvador Dali by Pichot, and there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time.Dali also experimented with Dada, which influenced Salvador Dali's work throughout Salvador Dali's life. At the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Salvador Dali became close friends with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, with whom Salvador Dali might have become romantically involved, and filmmaker Luis Bu'uel. Dali was expelled from the academy in 1926 shortly before Salvador Dali's final exams when Salvador Dali stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. That same year Salvador Dali made Salvador Dali's first visit to Paris where Salvador Dali met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dali revered; Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dali from Joan Mir'. Dali did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Mir' over the next few years as Salvador Dali moved toward developing Salvador Dali's own style.
Some trends in Dali's work that would continue throughout Salvador Dali's life were already evident in the 1920s, however. Dali devoured influences of all styles of art Salvador Dali could find and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant-garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of Salvador Dali's works in Barcelona attracted much attention and mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.
Dali grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by that of seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego Vel'zquez.
Salvador Dali 1929 until World War II
The Persistence of Memory (1931) is one of Dali's most famous works.Dali collaborated with the surrealistic film director Luis Bu'uel in 1929 on the short film Un chien andalou (English: An Andalusian Dog) and met Salvador Dali's muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Helena Dmitrievna Deluvina Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years Salvador Dali's senior who was then married to the surrealist poet Paul 'luard. Salvador Dali was mainly responsible for helping Bu'uel write the script for the film. Dali later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. In the same year, Dali had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although Salvador Dali's work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years). The surrealists hailed what Dali called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.In 1931, Dali painted one of Salvador Dali's most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, the work introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, including the ants and fly devouring the other watches.
On Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) Dali said, "the noise of the bee here causes the sting of the dart that will wake Gala."Dali and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They remarried in a Roman Catholic ceremony in 1958.
In 1936, Dali took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. Salvador Dali's lecture entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. When Francisco Franco came to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dali was one of the few Spanish intellectuals supportive of the new regime, which put Salvador Dali at odds with Salvador Dali's predominantly Marxist surrealist fellows over politics, eventually resulting in Salvador Dali's official expulsion from this group. At this, Dali retorted, "Le surr'alisme, c'est moi." Andr' Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dali), which more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which Salvador Dali referred to Dali after the period of Salvador Dali's expulsion; the surrealists henceforth spoke of Dali in the past tense, as if Salvador Dali were dead. The surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dali until the time of Salvador Dali's death and beyond. As World War II started in Europe, Dali and Gala moved to the United States in 1940, where they lived for eight years. In 1942, Salvador Dali published Salvador Dali's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali Later years in Catalonia
Dali Theatre and Museum in FigueresDali spent Salvador Dali's remaining years back in Salvador Dali's beloved Catalonia starting in 1949. The fact that Salvador Dali chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and many other artists. As such, probably at least some of the common dismissal of Dali's later works had more to do with politics than the actual merits of the works themselves. In 1959, Andr' Breton organized an exhibit called, Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the Fortieth Anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Salvador Dali, Joan Mir', Enrique T'bara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dali's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.Late in Salvador Dali's career, Dali did not confine himself to painting but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: Salvador Dali made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of Salvador Dali's works incorporate optical illusions. In Salvador Dali's later years, young artists like Andy Warhol proclaimed Dali an important influence on pop art. Dali also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of Salvador Dali's paintings, notably in the 1950s when Salvador Dali painted Salvador Dali's subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns, signifying divine geometry (as the rhinoceros horn grows according to a logarithmic spiral) and chastity (as Dali linked the rhinoceros to the Virgin Mary). Dali was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube; the latter, a 4-dimensional cube, is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)In 1960, Dali began work on the Dali Theatre and Museum in Salvador Dali's home town of Figueres; it was Salvador Dali's largest single project and the main focus of Salvador Dali's energy through 1974. Salvador Dali continued to make additions through the mid-1980s. Salvador Dali found time, however, to design the Chupa Chups logo in 1969. Also in 1969, Salvador Dali was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, and created a large metal sculpture, which stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Dali the title Marquis of Pubol, for which Dali later paid Salvador Dali back by giving Salvador Dali a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dali's final drawing) after the king visited Salvador Dali on Salvador Dali's deathbed.
Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dali lost much of Salvador Dali's will to live. Salvador Dali deliberately dehydrated himself possibly as a suicide attempt, possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation, as Salvador Dali had read that some microorganisms could do. Salvador Dali moved from Figueres to the castle in Pubol which Salvador Dali had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in Salvador Dali's bedroom under unclear circumstances possibly a suicide attempt by Dali, possibly simple negligence by Salvador Dali's staff. In any case, Dali was rescued and returned to Figueres where a group of Salvador Dali's friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that Salvador Dali was comfortable living in Salvador Dali's Theater-Museum for Salvador Dali's final years.
The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) contained Dali's symbolic elephant. Musee d'Art Moderne in BrusselsThere have been allegations that Salvador Dali's guardians forced Dali to sign blank canvases that would later (even after Salvador Dali's death) be used and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dali. Salvador Dali died of heart failure at Figueres on January 23, 1989 at the age of 84, and Salvador Dali is buried in the crypt of Salvador Dali's Teatro Museo in Figueres.
Salvador Dali Symbolism
Dali employed extensive symbolism in Salvador Dali's work. For instance, the hallmark soft watches that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dali when Salvador Dali was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese during a hot day in August.The elephant is also a recurring image in Dali's works, appearing first in Salvador Dali's 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture in Rome of an elephant carrying an obelisk, are portrayed "with long, multi-jointed, almost invisible legs of desire" along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure." I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.
The egg is another common Daliesque image. Salvador Dali connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Various animals appear throughout Salvador Dali's work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when Salvador Dali first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.
His fascination with ants has a strange explanation. When Dali was a young boy Salvador Dali had a pet bat. One day Salvador Dali discovered Salvador Dali's bat dead, covered in ants. Salvador Dali thus developed a fascination with and fear of ants.
Salvador Dali Endeavors outside painting
A photograph from the Dali Atomica series (1948) by Philippe HalsmanDali was a versatile artist, not limiting himself only to painting in Salvador Dali's artistic endeavors. Some of Salvador Dali's more popular artistic works are sculptures and other objects, and Salvador Dali is also noted for Salvador Dali's contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dali in 1936 and 1937, respectively. The Scottish patron Edward James commissioned both of these pieces from Dali; James, an eccentric who had inherited a large English estate when Salvador Dali was five, was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s. "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dali" according to the display caption for the Lobster Telephone at the Tate Gallery, "and Salvador Dali drew a close analogy between food and sex." The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dali to replace the phones in Salvador Dali's retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia. The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, who Dali apparently found fascinating. West was previously the subject of Dali's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. The Mae West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in England.
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) was Dali's way of ushering in the new science of physics above psychology.In theatre, Dali is remembered for constructing the scenery for Garcia Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda. For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannh'user, Dali provided both the set design and the libretto. Bacchanale was followed by set designs for Labyrinth in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949.
Dali also delved into the realms of filmmaking, most notably playing large roles in the production of Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art film co-written with Luis Bu'uel which is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. Dali's other major film work is the Disney cartoon production Destino; clocking in at a mere six minutes, it contains dream-like images of strange figures flying and walking about. Dali also designed the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945 film) which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis.
Dali built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In fashion, Salvador Dali's cooperation with the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dali was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dali made for her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. Salvador Dali was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. With Christian Dior in 1950, Dali created a special "costume for the year 2045." Photographers with whom Salvador Dali collaborated include Man Ray, Brassa', Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman. With Man Ray and Brassa', Dali photographed nature, while with the others Salvador Dali explored a range of obscure topics, including with Halsman the Dali Atomica series (1948) inspired by Salvador Dali's painting Leda Atomica which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water and Dali himself floating in the air."
References to Dali in the context of science are made in terms of Salvador Dali's fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, in 1958 Salvador Dali wrote in Salvador Dali's "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today the exterior world and that of physics, has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg." In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory and portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration, summarizes Dali's acknowledgment of the new science.
Architectural achievements include Salvador Dali's Port Lligat house near Cadaqu's as well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. Salvador Dali's literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), Diary of a Genius (1952'1963), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927'1933).The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts producing many etchings and lithographs. While Salvador Dali's early work in printmaking is equal in quality to Salvador Dali's important paintings as Salvador Dali grew older Salvador Dali unfortunately looked at printmaking as a money making scheme only and would sell the rights to images but not be involved in the print-production itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties thus further confusing the Dali print market.
Salvador Dali Politics and personality
Self-portrait, 1921 The politics of Salvador Dali played a significant role in Salvador Dali's emergence as an artist. Salvador Dali has sometimes been portrayed as a fascist supporter. Andr' Breton, in particular, nicknamed Salvador Dali "Avida Dollars" (an anagram) and made a strong effort to dissociate Salvador Dali's name from surrealists proper. The reality is probably somewhat more complex; in any event, Salvador Dali was probably not an anti-semite, given that Salvador Dali was a friendly acquaintance of famed architect and designer Paul L'szl', who was ethnically Jewish. In Salvador Dali's critical review of Dali's autobiography Secret Life, George Orwell wrote "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."In Salvador Dali's youth, Dali embraced for a time both anarchism and communism. Salvador Dali's writings account various anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction, which was in keeping with Dali's allegiance to the Dada movement. When Salvador Dali fell into the circle of mostly Marxist surrealists who denounced as enemies the monarchists on one hand and the anarchists on the other, Dali explained to them that Salvador Dali personally was an anarcho-monarchist. While in New York in 1942, Salvador Dali denounced Salvador Dali's surrealist colleague filmmaker Luis Bu'uel as an atheist, causing Bu'uel to be fired from Salvador Dali's position at the Museum of Modern Art and subsequently blacklisted from the American film industry.
Dali fled from fighting and refused to align himself with any group. Likewise, after World War II, George Orwell criticized Dali for "scuttling off like rat as soon as France is in danger" after Dali prospered there for years: "When the European War approaches Salvador Dali has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which Salvador Dali can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near." After Salvador Dali's return to Catalonia after World War II, Dali became closer to the Franco regime. Some of Dali's statements supported the Franco regime, congratulating Franco for Salvador Dali's actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces". Dali sent telegrams to Franco, "praising Salvador Dali for signing death warrants for political prisoners." Dali even painted a portrait of Franco's grand-daughter. It is impossible to determine whether Salvador Dali's tributes to Franco were sincere or whimsical; Salvador Dali also once sent a telegram praising the Conducator, Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, for Salvador Dali's adoption of a sceptre as part of Salvador Dali's regalia. The Romanian daily newspaper Sc'nteia published it, without suspecting its mocking aspect. Dali's eccentricities were tolerated by the Franco regime, since not many world-famous artists would accept living in Spain. One of Dali's few possible bits of open disobedience was Salvador Dali's continued praise of Federico Garcia Lorca even in the years when Lorca's works were banned.
In Carlos Lozano's biography, Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me, produced by the collaboration of Clifford Thurlow, Lozano makes it clear that Dali never stopped being a surrealist. As Dali said of himself: "the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist." Everything, including Salvador Dali's support for Franco and telegrams to Ceausescu must be seen in this light. Dali is famous for having said "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali."
Dali was a colorful and imposing presence in Salvador Dali's ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache. The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dali's expensive residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were startled when Cher sat down on an oddly-shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair. When signing autographs for fans, Dali would always keep their pens. When interviewed by Mike Wallace on TV's Sixty Minutes show, Dali kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of factly that "Dali is immortal and will not die".
