+ Salvador Dalí

+ Preguntas para el Repaso: ¿Qué piensas que Salvador Dalí quería expresar o comunicar con estas pinturas?

+ La persistencia de la memoria, 1931

+ Thoughts? Time is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. The monstrous fleshy creature draped across the paintings center is an approximation of Dalís own face in profile. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dalí painted this work with "the most imperialist fury of precision," but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” There is, however, a nod to the real: The distant golden cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, Dalís home.

+ Dormir, 1937

+ Thoughts? This painting is an attempt to duplicate the dream world into canvas. “Sleep” is virtually a visual rendering of the body's collapse into sleep, as if it was a collapse into a separate condition of being. As Dali attests in his book, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, “I have often imagined the monster of sleep as a heavy, giant head with a tapering body held up by the crutches of reality. When the crutches break we have the sensation of falling.”

+ La jirafa en llamas, 1936