AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF SURREALISM SALVADOR DALI AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF SURREALISM

SALVADOR DALI Salvador Dali (May 11, 1904 – Jan 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan Surrealist painter born in Figuerras. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist works. His painterly skills are often attributed to Dada and Renaissance master Dali’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture and photography, in collaboration with the range of artists in a variety of media

Beginnings As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. In the late 1920s, two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: • His discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery; and • His affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the "greater reality" of man's subconscious over his reason.

Golden Age Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. Their 1936 London International Surrealist exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibition. Dali and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dali joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy to the viewer.

Dali’s Separation to Breton’s Surrealist Dalí’s relationship with the dour Breton began to sour as he gained increasing commercial success and habitually sprinkled his rhetoric with provocative political and racial statements. When Dalí laid himself open to charges of fascism, it was too much for Breton who challenged him at the now famous Surrealist meeting in February 1934. Dalí responded to the charges made against him, in a mock courtroom situation, by declaring that they were irrelevant to the more important concerns of Surrealism Although Dalí survived the trial and continued to be an influential presence in the movement for the next five years, he was formally expelled by Breton in 1939

Dali and Surrealism To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.” Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.

He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of these enigmatic images is "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), in which limp, melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape.

Dali’s Symbolism Dalí invented his own ‘alphabet’ of symbols to express ideas and concepts. Here are someof his most common symbols that would help us interpret his works: Ants – death and decay. Crutch – several meanings, including support for inadequacy in life, tradition and death. Melting clocks – the relative nature of time. Grasshoppers – irrational fear. Flies – decay and symbol of his homeland, Spain. Eggs – Memories of the time before he was born. Keys – tools to unlock dreams

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