Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali is a talented, self-proclaimed artist that brought a new vison onto art. His parents supported his talent and built him his first studio when he was still a child inside of their summerhome. Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain. Dali did not limit himself to one particular style or medium. Beginning with his early impressionistic work going into his surrealistic works, for which he is best known, and ending in what is known as his classic period, it becomes apparent just how varied his styles and mediums are. He worked with oils, watercolors, drawings, sculptures, graphics and even movies. Dali held his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925 where his talents were first recognized. He became internationally known when some of his paintings were shown in the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. The next year he joined the Paris Surrealist Group and began his love affair with Gala who became more than just his lover, she was his business manager, muse and greatest inspiration. Surrealism emerged from what was left of Dada in the early 1920's and unlike Dada, a nihilistic movement, Surrealism held a promising and more positive view of art and because of this won many converts. It began as a literary movement in a Paris magazine. What they held in common was their belief in the importance of the unconscious mind and its manifestations, as was stressed by Freud. They believed that through the unconscious mind a plethora of artistic imagery would be unveiled. Both of these movements were also anti-establishment and they rejected the traditional Western Judeo-Christian beliefs and moral values and believed that reason and logic had failed man's quest for self-knowledge. The Surrealists differed from Dada in one other, ideological aspect. The Surrealists believed that man could indeed improve the human condition, the major difference between the two movements. A few years before his marriage to Gala in 1934, Dali emerged as a leader of the Surrealist Movement. Although Dali was intrigued with the Surrealist technique of automatism, in which the artist with pen and ink let his hand move quickly over the paper and let their thought through to the paper without allowing their minds to control those thoughts, he had already laid his foundation for his own Surrealistic art in his youth through his paranoiac-critical method. This contribution of his was an alternate manner in which to view or perceive reality. It was no new concept; it could be traced back to Leonardo da Vinci and his practice of staring at stains on walls, clouds, streams, etc. and seeing different figures in them. Everyone who goes cloud watching uses this technique. Dali, however gave this method a different twist. Dali linked his paranoiac-critical method, the ability to look at any object and see another, with paranoia, which was characterized then by chronic delusions and hallucinations. Dali himself was not paranoid but was able to place himself in paranoid states. In one of his more famous statements he said, "The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad." He was able to look at reality and dream of new ideas and paint them, which he called his "hand-painted dream photographs." Through his paranoiac-critical method, Dali was able to look at everyday objects and attach a subjective meaning based on his obsessions, phobias and conflicts. The result was a new, imaginative visual presentation of reality. By the forties, however, Dali began his move from Surrealism into what he called his classic era. This is the area I will be focusing on in paper when discussing several of his artworks. Just before World War II, Dali and his wife fled from Europe to the United States. They spent the next decade in the States where Dali went through a metamorphosis of sorts. He gave his first major retrospective exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and soon afterward he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. He began his series of eighteen large canvasses. One of the better known of these works is The Hallucinogenic Toreador. In this work Dali incorporated many elements from his Catalan culture, the toreador himself and the bull, his Catholic upbringing, the angels in the back of the arena, some of his artistic influences, the sculptures of the Venus de Milo found throughout the work and the face of his wife floating in the upper left hand corner.