Salvador gave the painting style its name. The most famous paintings of Salvador Dali
Today, May 11, is the birthday of the great Spanish painter and sculptor Salvador Dali . His legacy will forever remain with us, because in his works many find a piece of themselves - that very “madness” without which life would be boring and monotonous.
« Surrealism is me“, - the artist shamelessly asserted, and one cannot but agree with him. All his works are imbued with the spirit of surrealism - both paintings and photographs, which he created with unprecedented skill. Dali proclaimed complete freedom from any aesthetic or moral compulsion and went to the very limits in any creative experiment. He did not hesitate to bring to life the most provocative ideas and wrote everything: from love and the sexual revolution, history and technology to society and religion.
Great masturbator
The face of war
Splitting the atom
Hitler's mystery
Christ of Saint Juan de la Cruz
Dali began to be interested in art early and took private painting lessons from the artist while still at school Nunez , professor at the Academy of Arts. Then, at the School of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, he became close to the literary and artistic circles of Madrid - in particular, Luis Buñuel And Federico Garcia Lorcoy . However, he did not stay long at the Academy - he was expelled for some too bold ideas, which, however, did not stop him from organizing the first small exhibition of his works and quickly becoming one of the most famous artists of Catalonia.
Young women
Self-portrait with Raphael's neck
Basket with bread
Young woman seen from the back
After that Dali meets Gala, which became his muse of surrealism" Arriving at Salvador Dali with her husband, she immediately became inflamed with passion for the artist and left her husband for the sake of a genius. Dali but, absorbed in his feelings, as if he didn’t even notice that his “muse” had not arrived alone. Gala becomes his life partner and source of inspiration. She also became a bridge connecting the genius with the entire avant-garde community - her tact and gentleness allowed him to maintain at least some kind of relationship with his colleagues. The image of the beloved is reflected in many works Dali .
Portrait of Gala with two lamb ribs balancing on her shoulder
My wife, naked, looks at her own body, which has become a ladder, three vertebrae of a column, the sky and architecture
Galarina
Naked Dali, contemplating five ordered bodies, turning into carpuscules, from which Leda Leonardo, fertilized by the face of Gala, is unexpectedly created
Of course, if we talk about painting Dali , one cannot help but recall his most famous works:
A dream inspired by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, a moment before waking up
The Persistence of Memory
Flaming Giraffe
Swans reflected in elephants
Pliable Structure with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)
Anthropomorphic locker
Sodom self-satisfaction of an innocent maiden
Evening spider... hope
The Ghost of Wermeer of Delft, which can also serve as a table
Sculptures Dali took his surreal talent to a new level - from the plane of the canvas they jumped into three-dimensional space, acquiring shape and additional volume. Most of the works became intuitively familiar to the viewer - the master used in them the same images and ideas as in his canvases. To create sculptures Dali I had to spend several hours sculpting in wax and then creating molds for casting figures in bronze. Some of them were then cast in larger sizes.
Besides everything else, Dali was an excellent photographer, and in the century of the very beginning of the development of photography, together with Philip Halsman he managed to create absolutely incredible and surreal photographs.
Love art and enjoy the works of Salvador Dali!
Surrealism is the complete freedom of the human being and the right to dream. I am not a surrealist, I am surrealism, - S. Dali.
The formation of Dali's artistic skills took place in the era of early modernism, when his contemporaries largely represented such new artistic movements as expressionism and cubism.
In 1929, the young artist joined the surrealists. This year marked an important turning point in his life, as Salvador Dalí met Gala. She became his lover, wife, muse, model and main inspiration.
Since he was a brilliant draftsman and colorist, Dali drew a lot of inspiration from the old masters. But he used extravagant forms and inventive ways to compose a completely new, modern and innovative style of art. His paintings are distinguished by the use of double images, ironic scenes, optical illusions, dreamscapes and deep symbolism.
Throughout his creative life, Dali was never limited to one direction. He worked with oil paints and watercolors, creating drawings and sculptures, films and photographs. Even the variety of forms of execution was not alien to the artist, including the creation of jewelry and other works of applied art. As a screenwriter, Dali collaborated with the famous director Luis Buñuel, who directed the films “The Golden Age” and “Un Chien Andalou.” They displayed unreal scenes reminiscent of surrealist paintings come to life.
A prolific and extremely gifted master, he left a tremendous legacy for future generations of artists and art lovers. The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation launched an online project Catalog Raisonné of Salvador Dalí for a complete scientific cataloging of the paintings created by Salvador Dalí between 1910 and 1983. The catalog consists of five sections, divided according to the timeline. It was conceived not only to provide comprehensive information about the artist’s work, but also to determine the authorship of the works, since Salvador Dali is one of the most counterfeited painters.
The fantastic talent, imagination and skill of the eccentric Salvador Dali are demonstrated by these 17 examples of his surrealist paintings.
1. “The Ghost of Wermeer of Delft, which can be used as a table,” 1934
This small painting with a rather long original title embodies Dali's admiration for the great 17th-century Flemish master, Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer's self-portrait was executed taking into account Dali's surreal vision.
2. “The Great Masturbator”, 1929
The painting depicts the internal struggle of feelings caused by attitudes towards sexual intercourse. This perception of the artist arose as an awakened childhood memory when he saw a book left by his father, open to a page depicting genitals affected by sexually transmitted diseases.
3. “Giraffe on Fire,” 1937
The artist completed this work before moving to the USA in 1940. Although the master claimed that the painting was apolitical, it, like many others, depicts the deep and disturbing feelings of anxiety and horror that Dalí must have experienced during the turbulent period between the two world wars. A certain part reflects his internal struggle regarding the Spanish Civil War, and also refers to Freud's method of psychological analysis.
4. “The Face of War”, 1940
The agony of war was also reflected in Dali's work. He believed that his paintings should contain omens of war, which is what we see in the deadly head filled with skulls.
5. “Dream”, 1937
This depicts one of the surreal phenomena - a dream. This is a fragile, unstable reality in the world of the subconscious.
6. “Appearance of a face and a bowl of fruit on the seashore,” 1938
This fantastic painting is especially interesting because in it the author uses double images that give the image itself a multi-level meaning. Metamorphoses, surprising juxtapositions of objects and hidden elements characterize Dali's surrealist paintings.
7. “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931
This is perhaps the most recognizable surreal painting by Salvador Dali, which embodies softness and hardness, symbolizing the relativity of space and time. It draws heavily on Einstein's theory of relativity, although Dali said the idea for the painting came from seeing Camembert cheese melted in the sun.
8. “The Three Sphinxes of Bikini Island,” 1947
This surreal image of Bikini Atoll evokes the memory of war. Three symbolic sphinxes occupy different planes: a human head, a split tree and a mushroom of a nuclear explosion, speaking of the horrors of war. The film explores the relationship between three subjects.
9. “Galatea with Spheres”, 1952
Dali's portrait of his wife is presented through an array of spherical shapes. Gala looks like a portrait of Madonna. The artist, inspired by science, elevated Galatea above the tangible world into the upper ethereal layers.
10. “Molten Clock,” 1954
Another image of an object measuring time has received an ethereal softness, which is not typical for hard pocket watches.
11. “My naked wife contemplating her own flesh, transformed into a staircase, three vertebrae of a column, the sky and architecture,” 1945
Gala from the back. This remarkable image became one of Dali's most eclectic works, combining classicism and surrealism, tranquility and strangeness.
12. "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans", 1936
The second title of the painting is “Premonition of Civil War.” It depicts the supposed horrors of the Spanish Civil War as the artist painted it six months before the conflict began. This was one of Salvador Dali's premonitions.
13. “The Birth of Liquid Desires,” 1931-32
We see one example of a paranoid-critical approach to art. Images of the father and possibly the mother are mixed with a grotesque, unreal image of a hermaphrodite in the middle. The picture is filled with symbolism.
14. “The Riddle of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, My Mother,” 1929
This work, created on Freudian principles, became an example of Dalí's relationship with his mother, whose distorted body appears in the Dalinian desert.
15. Untitled - Design of a fresco painting for Helena Rubinstein, 1942
The images were created for the interior decoration of the premises by order of Elena Rubinstein. This is a frankly surreal picture from the world of fantasy and dreams. The artist was inspired by classical mythology.
16. “Sodom self-satisfaction of an innocent maiden,” 1954
The painting depicts a female figure and an abstract background. The artist explores the issue of repressed sexuality, as follows from the title of the work and the phallic forms that often appear in Dali's work.
17. “Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,” 1943
The artist expressed his skeptical views by painting this picture while in the United States. The shape of the ball seems to be a symbolic incubator of the “new” man, the man of the “new world”.
Thousands of books and songs have been written about Salvador Dali, many films have been made, but it is not necessary to watch, read and listen to all this - after all, there are his paintings. The brilliant Spaniard proved by his own example that a whole universe lives in every person and immortalized himself in canvases that will be in the center of attention of all mankind for centuries to come. Dali has long been not just an artist, but something like a global cultural meme. How do you like the opportunity to feel like a tabloid newspaper reporter and delve into the dirty laundry of a genius?
1. Grandfather's suicide
In 1886, Gal Josep Salvador, Dali's paternal grandfather, took his own life. The grandfather of the great artist suffered from depression and mania of persecution, and in order to annoy everyone who was “watching” him, he decided to leave this mortal world.
One day he went out onto the balcony of his apartment on the third floor and began screaming that they had robbed him and tried to kill him. The arriving police were able to convince the unfortunate man not to jump from the balcony, but as it turned out, only for a while - six days later, Gal nevertheless threw himself from the balcony headfirst and died suddenly.
For obvious reasons, the Dali family tried to avoid wide publicity, so the suicide was hushed up. In the death report there was not a word about suicide, only a note that Gal died “from a traumatic brain injury,” so the suicide was buried according to Catholic rites. For a long time, relatives hid the truth about the death of their grandfather from Gala’s grandchildren, but the artist eventually learned about this unpleasant story.
2. Masturbation Addiction
As a teenager, Salvador Dali loved, so to speak, to compare penises with his classmates, and he called his own “small, pathetic and soft.” The early erotic experiences of the future genius did not end with these harmless pranks: somehow a pornographic novel fell into his hands and what struck him most was the episode where the main character boasted that he “could make a woman squeak like a watermelon.” The young man was so impressed by the power of the artistic image that, remembering this, he reproached himself for his inability to do the same with women.
In his autobiography “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali” (originally “The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali”), the artist admits: “For a long time it seemed to me that I was impotent.” Probably, in order to overcome this oppressive feeling, Dali, like many boys of his age, engaged in masturbation, to which he was so addicted that throughout the life of a genius, masturbation was his main, and sometimes even the only, way of sexual satisfaction. At that time, it was believed that masturbation could lead a person to madness, homosexuality and impotence, so the artist was constantly in fear, but could not help himself.
3. Dali associated sex with rotting
One of the genius’s complexes arose due to the fault of his father, who once (on purpose or not) left a book on the piano, which was full of colorful photographs of male and female genitalia, disfigured by gangrene and other diseases. Having studied the photographs that enchanted and at the same time horrified him, Dali Jr. lost interest in contacts with the opposite sex for a long time, and sex, as he later admitted, began to be associated with rotting, decomposition and decay.
Of course, the artist’s attitude towards sex is noticeably reflected in his canvases: fears and motifs of destruction and decay (most often depicted in the form of ants) are found in almost every work. For example, in “The Great Masturbator,” one of his most significant paintings, there is a human face looking down, from which a woman “grows,” most likely based on Dali’s wife and muse Gala. A locust sits on the face (the genius felt an inexplicable horror of this insect), along whose abdomen ants crawl - a symbol of decomposition. The woman's mouth is pressed against the groin of the man standing next to him, which hints at oral sex, while cuts on the man's legs are bleeding, indicating the artist's fear of castration, which he experienced as a child.
4. Love is evil
In his youth, one of Dali's closest friends was the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. There were rumors that Lorca even tried to seduce the artist, but Dali himself denied this. Many contemporaries of the great Spaniards said that for Lorca, the love union of the painter and Elena Dyakonova, later known as Gala Dali, was an unpleasant surprise - supposedly the poet was convinced that the genius of surrealism could only be happy with him. It must be said that despite all the gossip, there is no exact information about the nature of the relationship between the two outstanding men.
Many researchers of the artist’s life agree that before meeting Gala, Dali remained a virgin, and although at that time Gala was married to someone else, had an extensive collection of lovers, and was, after all, ten years older than him, the artist was fascinated by this woman. Art critic John Richardson wrote of her: “One of the nastiest wives a successful modern artist could choose. It’s enough to get to know her to start hating her.” At one of the first meetings with Gala, he asked what she wanted from him. This, without a doubt, extraordinary woman replied: “I want you to kill me” - after this, Dali immediately fell in love with her, completely and irrevocably.
Dali's father couldn't stand his son's passion, mistakenly believing that she was using drugs and forcing the artist to sell them. The genius insisted on continuing the relationship, as a result of which he was left without his father’s inheritance and went to Paris to his beloved, but before that, as a sign of protest, he shaved his head bald and “buried” his hair on the beach.
5. Voyeur genius
It is believed that Salvador Dali received sexual satisfaction from watching others make love or masturbate. The brilliant Spaniard even spied on his own wife while she was taking a bath, admitted to the “exciting experience of a voyeur” and called one of his paintings “Voyeur”.
Contemporaries whispered that the artist organized orgies at his home every week, but if this is true, most likely he himself did not take part in them, content with the role of spectator. One way or another, Dali’s antics shocked and irritated even depraved bohemians - art critic Brian Sewell, describing his acquaintance with the artist, said that Dali asked him to take off his pants and masturbate, lying in the fetal position under the statue of Jesus Christ in the painter’s garden. According to Sewell, Dali made similar strange requests to many of his guests.
Singer Cher recalls that she and her husband Sonny once went to visit the artist, and he looked like he had just participated in an orgy. When Cher began to twirl in her hands the beautifully painted rubber wand that interested her, the genius solemnly informed her that it was a vibrator.
6. George Orwell: “He is sick and his paintings are disgusting”
In 1944, the famous writer dedicated an essay to the artist entitled “The Privilege of Spiritual Shepherds: Notes on Salvador Dali,” in which he expressed the opinion that the artist’s talent makes people consider him impeccable and perfect.
Orwell wrote: "If Shakespeare returned to the land tomorrow and found that his favorite leisure pastime was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go on like that just because he is capable of writing another one." King Lear." You need the ability to keep both facts in your head at the same time: the fact that Dali is a good draftsman, and the fact that he is a disgusting person.”
The writer also notes the pronounced necrophilia and coprophagia (craving for excrement) present in Dali’s paintings. One of the most famous works of this kind is considered to be “The Gloomy Game”, written in 1929 - at the bottom of the masterpiece is a man stained with feces. Similar details are present in the painter’s later works.
In his essay, Orwell concludes that “men like Dali are undesirable, and the society in which they can flourish is somehow flawed.” One might say that the writer himself admitted his unjustified idealism: after all, the human world has never been and will never be perfect, and Dali’s impeccable paintings are one of the clearest evidence of this.
7. "Hidden Faces"
Salvador Dali wrote his only novel in 1943, when he and his wife were in the United States. Among other things, the literary work produced by the artist contains descriptions of the antics of eccentric aristocrats in the Old World, engulfed in fire and drenched in blood, while the artist himself called the novel “an epitaph for pre-war Europe.”
If the artist’s autobiography can be considered a fantasy disguised as the truth, then “Hidden Faces” is more likely the truth disguised as fiction. In the book, which was sensational in its time, there is also such an episode - Adolf Hitler, who won the war, in his Eagle’s Nest residence, tries to brighten up his loneliness with priceless masterpieces of art from all over the world laid out around him, Wagner’s music plays, and the Fuhrer makes semi-delirious speeches about Jews and Jesus Christ.
Reviews of the novel were generally favorable, although a literary reviewer for The Times criticized the novel's whimsical style, excessive adjectives, and muddled plot. At the same time, for example, a critic from The Spectator magazine wrote about Dali’s literary experience: “It’s a psychotic mess, but I liked it.”
8. Beats, so... a genius?
The year 1980 became a turning point for the elderly Dali - the artist was paralyzed and, unable to hold a brush in his hands, he stopped painting. For a genius, this was akin to torture - he had not been balanced before, but now he began to lose his temper with or without reason, and besides, he was greatly irritated by the behavior of Gala, who spent the money she received from the sale of her brilliant husband’s paintings on young fans and lovers, and gave them gifts herself. masterpieces, and also often disappeared from home for several days.
The artist began to beat his wife, so much so that one day he broke two of her ribs. To calm her husband down, Gala gave him Valium and other sedatives, and once gave Dali a large dose of a stimulant, which caused irreparable damage to the genius’s psyche.
The painter’s friends organized the so-called “Rescue Committee” and admitted him to the clinic, but by that time the great artist was a pitiful sight - a thin, shaking old man, constantly in fear that Gala would leave him for the actor Jeffrey Fenholt, who played the leading role in the Broadway play production of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar”.
9. Instead of skeletons in the closet - the corpse of his wife in the car
On June 10, 1982, Gala left the artist, but not for the sake of another man - the 87-year-old muse of the genius died in a hospital in Barcelona. According to her will, Dali was going to bury his beloved in the Pubol castle in Catalonia, which he owned, but for this, her body had to be removed without legal red tape and without attracting unnecessary attention from the press and public.
The artist found a way out, creepy but witty - he ordered Gala to be dressed, “put” the corpse in the back seat of her Cadillac, and a nurse stood nearby supporting the body. The deceased was taken to Pubol, embalmed and dressed in her favorite red Dior dress, and then buried in the castle crypt. The inconsolable husband spent several nights kneeling in front of the grave and exhausted from horror - their relationship with Gala was complicated, but the artist could not imagine how he would live without her. Dali lived in the castle almost until his death, sobbed for hours and said that he saw various animals - he began to hallucinate.
10. Infernal invalid
Just over two years after the death of his wife, Dali again experienced a real nightmare - on August 30, the bed in which the 80-year-old artist was sleeping caught fire. The cause of the fire was a short circuit in the castle's electrical wiring, believed to have been caused by the old man constantly fiddling with the maid's bell button attached to his pajamas.
When a nurse came running at the sound of the fire, she found the paralyzed genius lying at the door in a semi-fainting state and immediately rushed to give him mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration, although he tried to fight back and called her “bitch” and “murderer.” The genius survived, but received second degree burns.
After the fire, Dali became completely unbearable, although he had not previously had an easy character. A publicist from Vanity Fair noted that the artist turned into a “disabled man from hell”: he deliberately soiled bed linen, scratched nurses’ faces and refused to eat or take medications.
After recovery, Salvador Dali moved his theater-museum to the neighboring town of Figueres, where he died on January 23, 1989. The Great Artist once said that he hoped to be resurrected, so he wanted his body to be frozen after death, but instead, according to his will, he was embalmed and walled up in the floor of one of the rooms of the theater-museum, where it remains to this day.
Salvador Domenech Felip Jacinth Dali and Domenech, Marquis de Pubol (1904 - 1989) - Spanish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, director, writer. One of the most famous representatives of surrealism.
BIOGRAPHY OF SALVADOR DALI
Salvador Dali was born in the town of Figueres in Catalonia, in the family of a lawyer. His creative abilities manifested themselves in early childhood. At the age of seventeen he was admitted to the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where fate happily brought him together with G. Lorca, L. Buñuel, R. Alberti. While studying at the academy, Dali enthusiastically and obsessively studied the works of the old masters, the masterpieces of Velazquez, Zurbaran, El Greco, and Goya. He is influenced by the cubist paintings of H. Gris, the metaphysical painting of the Italians, and is seriously interested in the legacy of I. Bosch.
Studying at the Madrid Academy from 1921 to 1925 was for the artist a time of persistent comprehension of professional culture, the beginning of a creative understanding of the traditions of masters of past eras and the discoveries of his older contemporaries.
During his first trip to Paris in 1926, he met P. Picasso. Impressed by the meeting, which changed the direction of the search for his own artistic language, corresponding to his worldview, Dali creates his first surreal work, “The Splendor of the Hand.” However, Paris inexorably attracts him, and in 1929 he makes a second trip to France. There he enters the circle of Parisian surrealists and gets the opportunity to see their personal exhibitions.
At the same time, together with Buñuel, Dali made two films that have already become classics - “Un Chien Andalou” and “The Golden Age”. His role in the creation of these works is not the main one, but he is always mentioned second, as a screenwriter and at the same time an actor.
In October 1929 he married Gala. Russian by birth, aristocrat Elena Dmitrievna Dyakonova occupied the most important place in the life and work of the artist. The appearance of Gala gave his art a new meaning. In the master’s book “Dali by Dali” he gives the following periodization of his work: “Dali – Planetary, Dali – Molecular, Dali – Monarchical, Dali – Hallucinogenic, Dali – Future”! Of course, it is difficult to fit the work of this great improviser and mystifier into such a narrow framework. He himself admitted: “I don’t know when I start pretending or telling the truth.”
THE WORK OF SALVADOR DALI
Around 1923, Dalí began his experiments with Cubism, often even locking himself in his room to paint. In 1925, Dali painted another painting in the style of Picasso: Venus and the Sailor. She was one of the seventeen paintings exhibited at Dali’s first personal exhibition. The second exhibition of Dali's works, held in Barcelona at the Delmo Gallery at the end of 1926, was greeted with even greater enthusiasm than the first.
Venus and the Sailor The Great Masturbator Metamorphoses of Narcissus The Riddle of William Tell
In 1929, Dali painted The Great Masturbator, one of the most significant works of that period. It shows a large, wax-like head with dark red cheeks and half-closed eyes with very long eyelashes. A huge nose rests on the ground, and instead of a mouth there is a rotting grasshopper with ants crawling on it. Similar themes were typical for Dali’s works in the 1930s: he had an extraordinary weakness for images of grasshoppers, ants, telephones, keys, crutches, bread, hair. Dali himself called his technique manual photography of concrete irrationality. It was based, as he said, on associations and interpretations of unrelated phenomena. Surprisingly, the artist himself noted that he did not understand all of his images. Although Dali's work was well received by critics, who predicted a great future for him, the success did not bring immediate benefits. And Dali spent days traveling through the streets of Paris in a vain search for buyers for his original images. For example, they included a woman's shoe with large steel springs, glasses with glasses the size of a fingernail, and even a plaster head of a roaring lion with fried chips.
In 1930, Dali's paintings began to bring him fame. His work was influenced by the works of Freud. In his paintings he reflected human sexual experiences, as well as destruction and death. His masterpieces such as “Soft Hours” and “The Persistence of Memory” were created. Dali also creates numerous models from various objects.
Between 1936 and 1937, Dali worked on one of his most famous paintings, “Metamorphoses of Narcissus,” and a book of the same name immediately appeared. In 1953, a large-scale exhibition took place in Rome. He exhibits 24 paintings, 27 drawings, 102 watercolors.
Meanwhile, in 1959, since his father no longer wanted to let Dali in, he and Gala settled down to live in Port Lligat. Dali's paintings were already extremely popular, sold for a lot of money, and he himself was famous. He often communicates with William Tell. Under the influence, he creates such works as “The Riddle of William Tell” and “William Tell.”
In 1973, the Dali Museum opened in Figueras, incredible in its content. Until now, he amazes viewers with his surreal appearance.
The last work, “Swallowtail,” was completed in 1983.
Salvador Dali often went to bed with a key in his hand. Sitting on a chair, he fell asleep with a heavy key clutched between his fingers. Gradually the grip weakened, the key fell and hit a plate lying on the floor. Thoughts that arose during naps could be new ideas or solutions to complex problems.
In 1961, Salvador Dali drew the “Chupa Chups” logo for Enrique Bernat, the founder of the Spanish lollipop company, which, in a slightly modified form, is today recognizable in all corners of the planet.
In 2003, the Walt Disney Company released the animated film “Destino,” which Salvador Dahl and Walt Disney began to draw back in 1945; the picture lay in the archives for 58 years.
A crater on Mercury is named after Salvador Dali.
During his lifetime, the great artist bequeathed to be buried in such a way that people could walk on the grave, so his body was walled up in a wall at the Dali Museum in Figueres. Flash photography is not permitted in this room.
Arriving in New York in 1934, he carried a 2-meter-long loaf of bread in his hands as an accessory, and while visiting an exhibition of surrealist creativity in London, he dressed in a diver’s suit.
At different times, Dali declared himself either a monarchist, or an anarchist, or a communist, or a supporter of authoritarian power, or refused to associate himself with any political movement. After World War II and his return to Catalonia, Salvador supported Franco's authoritarian regime and even painted a portrait of his granddaughter.
Dali sent a telegram to the Romanian leader Nicolas Ceausescu, written in the manner characteristic of the artist: in words he supported the communist, but caustic irony was read between the lines. Without noticing the catch, the telegram was published in the daily newspaper Scînteia.
The now famous singer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, while still young, attended Salvador Dali's party, which he threw at the New York Plaza Hotel. There, Cher accidentally sat on a strangely shaped sex toy placed on her chair by the host of the event.
In 2008, the film “Echoes of the Past” was made about El Salvador. The role of Dali was played by Robert Pattinson. For some time Dali worked together with Alfred Hitchcock.
In his life, Dali himself completed only one film, Impressions from Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he told the story of an expedition that went in search of huge hallucinogenic mushrooms. The video series “Impressions of Upper Mongolia” is largely based on enlarged microscopic stains of uric acid on a brass strip. As you can guess, the “author” of these spots was the maestro. Over the course of several weeks, he “painted” them on a piece of brass.
Together with Christian Dior in 1950, Dali created the “suit for 2045.”
Dali wrote the painting “The Persistence of Memory” (“Soft Hours”) under the impression of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The idea in Salvador's head took shape while he was looking at a piece of Camembert cheese one hot August day.
For the first time, the image of an elephant appears on the canvas “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Waking Up.” In addition to elephants, Dali often used images of other representatives of the animal kingdom in his paintings: ants (symbolized death, decay and, at the same time, great sexual desire), he associated a snail with a human head (see portraits of Sigmund Freud), locusts in his work is associated with waste and a sense of fear.
The eggs in Dali’s paintings symbolize prenatal, intrauterine development; if you look deeper, we are talking about hope and love.
On December 7, 1959, the presentation of the ovocypede took place in Paris: a device that was invented by Salvador Dali and brought to life by engineer Laparra. Ovosiped is a transparent ball with a seat fixed inside for one person. This “transport” became one of the devices that Dali successfully used to shock the public with his appearance.
QUOTES GAVE
Art is a terrible disease, but it is impossible to live without it yet.
With art I straighten myself out and infect normal people.
The artist is not the one who is inspired, but the one who inspires.
Painting and Dali are not the same thing; as an artist, I do not overestimate myself. It's just that others are so bad that I turned out to be better.
I saw it and it sunk into my soul and spilled through my brush onto the canvas. This is painting. And the same thing is love.
For an artist, every touch of a brush to a canvas is a whole life drama.
My painting is life and food, flesh and blood. Don't look for any intelligence or feelings in her.
Through the centuries, Leonardo da Vinci and I stretch out our hands to each other.
I think that now we are in the Middle Ages, but someday the Renaissance will come.
I'm decadent. In art, I’m something like camembert cheese: just a little too much, and that’s it. I, the last echo of antiquity, stand on the very edge.
Landscape is a state of mind.
Painting is a hand-made color photograph of all possible, super-exquisite, unusual, super-aesthetic examples of specific irrationality.
My painting is life and food, flesh and blood. Don't look for any intelligence or feelings in her.
A work of art does not awaken any feelings in me. Looking at a masterpiece makes me ecstatic about what I can learn. It doesn’t even occur to me to be overwhelmed with emotion.
The artist thinks with drawing.
It is good taste that is sterile - for an artist there is nothing more harmful than good taste. Take the French - because of their good taste, they have become completely lazy.
Do not try to cover up your mediocrity with deliberately careless painting - it will reveal itself in the very first stroke.
First, learn to draw and write like the old masters, and only then act at your own discretion - and you will be respected.
Surrealism is not a party, not a label, but a unique state of mind, not constrained by slogans or morality. Surrealism is the complete freedom of the human being and the right to dream. I am not a surrealist, I am surrealism.
I - the highest embodiment of surrealism - follow the tradition of the Spanish mystics.
The difference between the surrealists and me is that the surrealist is me.
I am not a surrealist, I am surrealism.
BIOGRAPHY AND FILMOGRAPHY OF SALVADOR DALI
Literature
"The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Told by Himself" (1942)
"The Diary of a Genius" (1952-1963)
Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927-33)
"The tragic myth of Angelus Millet"
Working on films
"Andalusian dog"
"Golden age"
"Spellbound"
"Impressions from Upper Mongolia"
When writing this article, materials from the following sites were used:kinofilms.tv , .
If you find any inaccuracies or want to add to this article, send us information to the email address admin@site, we, and our readers, will be very grateful to you.
Date of birth: May 11, 1904.
Date of death: January 23, 1989.
Full name: Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali and Domenech, Marquis de Pubol (Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali "i Dome`nech, Marque"s de Pu"bol).
Spanish artist, painter, sculptor, director.
“The difference between the surrealists and me is that the surrealist is me,” Salvador Dali.
“I’m walking, and scandals are following me in a crowd”
Nothing foreshadowed that the wealthy family of the notary Don Salvador Dali y Cusi would give birth to a child who would later turn classical concepts of drawing methods on their head, the greatest genius of the era of surrealism. But it happened - a boy was born, who was named Salvador Dali. This event took place near Barcelona in the Spanish town of Figueres in 1904.
At the age of 12, Dali graduated from art school. Having persuaded his parents, at the age of 17 he entered the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He was “asked out” in 1926 for his inappropriate attitude towards the academic council and teachers. But by that time his exhibition had already taken place in Barcelona, and the artist’s works attracted close attention in artistic circles. In Paris, where Jean-Leon Jerome himself once worked, he meets Picasso, who had a huge influence on his work. Dali would pay tribute to his newfound friend with the painting “Flesh on the Stones” (1926).
The influence of Cubism is visible in the works of that period - “Young Women” (1923). An example of a completely different style was a painting painted in 1928 and exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh - “Basket of Bread” (1925).
Like all artists of that time, Dali worked in a wide variety of fashionable styles. In the works of the period from 1914 to 1927, the influence of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Cezanne, and Caravaggio is visible. But gradually notes of surrealism begin to appear in the paintings.
"Surrealism is me"
Salvador Dali began to realize that the era of cubism was behind him, and, working in the classical style, he would get lost among other artists like himself. Therefore, he chose the most optimal path to realize his talent and ambition. The theory of surrealism corresponded very well to this. The first paintings in this style: “Venus and the Sailor” (1925), “Flying Woman”, “Honey is Sweeter than Blood” (1941), etc.
The year 1929 was a turning point for Salvador Dali - two events happened that radically influenced his life and work:
Firstly, the artist met with Gala Eluard, who later became his assistant, lover, muse, and wife. Since then they have not parted, despite the fact that the woman at that time was married to his friend Paul Eluard. From the very beginning of their acquaintance, Gala became a salvation for the artist from a mental crisis. Dali once said: “I love Gala more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso and even more than money.” The artist created a magnificent cult of Gala, which has since appeared in many of his works, including in divine guise.
Secondly, Dali officially joined the Parisian surrealist movement. And in 1929, his exhibition took place at the Hermann Gallery in Paris, after which fame came to the artist.
In the same year, Salvador Dali and his friend Luis Buñuel created the script for the film “Un Chien Andalou.” It was Dali who came up with the most shocking scene known to this day, where a human eye is cut in half by a razor.
Dali's father, angered by his connection with Gala, forbade his son to appear in his house. The artist worked hard to earn some money. It was at this time that the painting “The Persistence of Memory” was created, which became a symbol of the concept of the relativity of time.
Although the artist often expressed the idea that events in the world worried him little, he was still very worried about the fate of Spain. The result was the painting “Pliable Structure with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” (1935).
In 1940, while in America, the master wrote his best book, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Written by Himself.” The artist’s ability to work is amazing, he can work as a painter, decorator, jeweler, portrait painter, illustrator, making sets for Alfred Hitchcock’s films, for example, “Spellbound” 1945. After the explosion over Hiroshima in 1945. Dali expresses his attitude to this with the painting “Splitting the Atom.”
In 1965, the artist met Amanda Lear, their strange relationship would last more than 20 years. She will tell her story many years later in the book “Dali Through the Eyes of Amanda.”
Beginning in 1970, Salvador Dali's health began to rapidly deteriorate, but his creative energy did not decrease. At this time, the painting “The Hallucinogenic Torrero” (1968-1970) was created. Dali's popularity was crazy. He painted pictures based on many masterpieces of world literature: the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Ovid's The Art of Love, Freud's God and Monotheism.
“My whole life has been theater”
In 1961 The mayor of Figueres asked the artist to present a painting to Dali’s hometown. The master decided to develop the idea in 1974. He erected his own museum on the site of the ancient city theater. A giant spherical dome was raised above the stage, and the auditorium itself was divided into sectors, each of which represents a certain era in Dali’s work. Intricate interior spaces, nested floors, a courtyard with cultured areas where the visitor's head will spin - all this serves as a symbol of the artist's creativity and invariably attracts tourists from all over the world.
After Gala's death in 1982, the artist's health deteriorated, and he threw himself into his work. Dali paints paintings inspired by the heads of Moses and Adam, Giuliano de' Medici. The last work, “Swallowtail,” was completed in 1983, and in 1989, at the age of 84, the artist died of a heart attack. “My whole life has been a theater,” and during his lifetime he bequeathed to bury himself so that people could walk on his grave. His body is walled up in the floor of his museum-theater.
Salvador Dali, like a magician, juggled images in his paintings. His works amazed his contemporaries with the realism of fictitious images and plots; they were made in his characteristic grotesque manner: “Soft Hours”, “Burning Giraffe”, “A Dream Inspired by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, a Moment Before Awakening”, “The Last Supper”. His works are controversial, and his artistic heritage is sold at auction with very controversial bids.
Dali created a myth about himself with his own hands; his image with a mustache a la Baron Munchausen is recognizable all over the world. Much is known about him, but even more will never be known.