Salvador Dali

Spanish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, director and writer. One of the most famous figures in Surrealism, and author of “The Persistence of Memory”, one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century.

Dalí started painting at the age of four. He created his first serious work at the age of ten. It was a small impressionistic landscape, painted on a wooden board with oil paints. Henceforth, Dali spent whole days sitting in a small, specially allocated room and painting pictures. “I wanted to be given the laundry under the roof of our house. I got it and made it my own workshop, decorating it in the way I preferred,” he remembered later. Moreover, he liked to analyze the works of famous artists. He wrote and published essays about the works of Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Salvador Dalí was influenced by art from Renaissance, Impressionist, Pointillist and Cubist legends. The main content of his early works was landscaped in the vicinity of Figueras and Cadaques. “He drew passionately and greedily as if he was an obsessed person,” – said Salvador Dali about himself in the third person. In the late 1920s, Dali started creating Surrealist paintings, depicting his inner world, rather than the real one.

Some people who knew the artist said that he was a real narcissist and a madman. He enjoyed talking a lot about himself, and published diaries, biographies, wrote many poems, articles and other literary works. Salvador Dali even created several myths about himself. His enthusiasm for the persona of Adolf Hitler was a truly mysterious phenomenon, which led to a break with his friends and colleagues.

Key ideas:

– The artist often claimed that the world of art should not touch on political and historical events. (In spite of that, he painted the picture “Spain” when the war in his country had finished).

– His paintings, texts, films, installations, photo reports and ballet productions are distinguished by their irony and paradox. However, despite his combination of the incompatible, and his blending of soft and stiff stylistics, his compositions are built according to the rules of academic art.

– Dali developed his method of perceiving reality. It is based on the human ability to perceive multiple images within one object. The artist named it the “paranoiac-critical method” based on “irrational knowledge”. He employed the method in numerous pieces of art.