[PAINTING] [SURREALISM] Salvador Dali

Galatea of the Spheres

Salvador Dali is one of the most popular and prolific artists in history, while his artwork is recognized with ease all over the world. He was an eccentric man without any question, and while some find his artwork utterly pointless, so many others have found inspiration in his vision. With Dali is either love him or hate him, but it's hard not to recognize he has millions of fans.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born in Figueres, Spain May 11, 1904. By the time he was 14 he had already set up a studio in his parents' home where he continued to draw and paint following the next years of his life.
There is an interesting fact in Salvador Dali's life that hints he was prone to eccentricity ever since he was a little boy, but his parents had a lot to do with that. When Salvador Dali was 5 his parents took him to see his dead brother's grave who was named Salvador. His parents often used to tell Salvador Dali he was the reincarnation of his deceased older brother. Salvador Dali writes: "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute."

Salvador and his dad clashed violently throughout the years, mostly because of the artist's eccentricity and passion for drawing and painting. It also didn't help that Salvador's mother supported his eccentricities and passion for art. It was after Salvador Dali and his father had a fight over art school, the artist wrote this passage:

“The supreme and perhaps most important decision of my life, since it indicates the direction that I have to follow, is the following (which has been approved by my family): I shall quickly finish my remaining studies, doing the remaining two years in just one. Then I’ll go to Madrid to the Academia de bellas artes…There I intend to spend three years working like mad, anyway the Academia is a fine place. Then by sacrificing myself and submitting to truth I will win the prize to study for four years in Rome; and coming back from Rome I’ll be a genius, and the world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be more despised and misunderstood, but I ll be a genius, a great genius, I am sure of it."

After his mother died and his father remarried the painter's aunt, Salvador Dali enrolled in the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. It was the beginning of an experimental time, when he tried on different artistic styles like Metaphysics and Cubism and became familiar with the classic Raphael, Bronzino and Valsquez. It didn't take long before Salvador Dali's eccentricity got him expelled and even arrested and imprisoned in Gerona.

It was between 1926 and 1929 during his several trips to Paris that Salvador Dali met Joan Miro, Paul Eluard and Rene Magritte who introduced him to Surrealism. In 1929, following his experimentation with Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism, Dali began his first Surreal period, when he used in his paintings sexual symbolism, ideographic imagery, collage.

Salvador Dali's paintings are actual collages of his dream images and it wasn't long before his very own style brought something new to the Surrealist Movement: the paranoiac-critical method, a mental exercise meant to boost the artist's creativity by tapping into the subconscious mind. The paranoiac-critical method is a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena" as Salvador Dali himself wrote.