| |
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
|
 |
|
"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Salvador Dali :: Biography and Books"
|
|
 |
|
 |
| | |
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was a Spanish Surrealist painter in the 20th century. His eccentricity, exhibitionism and flamboyant waxed moustache were iconic of him. He painted bizarre fantasy worlds in an extremely precise manner.
|
| |
|
|
|
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was a Spanish painter and the best-known Surrealist of the 20th century. Dalí used a wild imagination to produce over 1,500 paintings in his career, which was strongly influenced by the Cubism of Picasso and the psychological theories of Freud.
Dalí was known to attract publicity with his eccentric manners and being as surreal as his works, making radical statements more to shock listeners than from any conviction. He was famous for having said: ‘Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí’
Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres in Catalonia, Spain. He was producing highly sophisticated drawings at an early age. He had his first public exhibition of his paintings at age of 14, at the municipal theater in Figueres. In 1922, Dalí entered the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He was expelled from the art academy for refusing to take an exam. He stated that no one was competent enough to examine him.
In 1926, he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso. The following years he did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and moved toward developing his own style. Dalí created a style that depicted strange subjects and a nightmarish fantasy world in a very precise and realistic way. Objects are very detailed and exact but do not fit with other objects or the space in which weird perspectives are used. In his dreamscapes, he transformed the world of images to reflect his own fantasy world.
Dalí created his most famous works between 1929 and 1939. In this period, he joined a surrealist group in Montparnasse. Dalí developed his Paranoiac-critical method as an alternative for political actions. The method meant that he looked at one object and ‘saw’ another. He took a story with a generally accepted interpretation and imposed upon it his own hallucinations, as he did with the story of William Tell. His most famous work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), is a good example. The melting clocks suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative.
At the end of the 1930s, Dalí’s ego-maniac manners and open support of Franco’s regime resulted in expulsion from the surrealist movement. Dalí started to use a more academic style and began to paint Catholic subjects in his famous hallucinating style like The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946). He also designed stage sets (Labyrinth, 1941), jewelry (The Royal Heart), interior and book illustrations, and made movies (L'Age d'Or, 1930) and an animated cartoon for Disney (2003).
In his last years, Dalí was often the subject of controversy which had nothing to do with his work, but all with his publicity-seeking antics and commercialism. Also, his guardians forced him to sign blank canvasses and a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the 1980s. After the death of his wife Gala, we lost will to live. He developed Parkinson's disease and suffered a mental deterioration. Salvador Dalí died of heart failure on 23 January 1989 at Pigueras Hospital in Figueras, Spain. He is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres.
|
| |
|
|
|
