Salvador Dali Surrealist
The Boy Dreamer Salvador Dali was born in Figueres, Spain on May 11, 1904. His father was a lawyer and very strict, but his mother was kinder and encouraged Salvador s love for art. He ofen got into trouble for daydreaming in school. He had a sister named Ana Maria who would ofen act as a model for his painhngs.
BECOMING AN ARTIST: Even as a teenager he experimented with modern painhng styles. When he turned seventeen he moved to Madrid, Spain to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Dali lived a wild life while at the academy. He grew his hair and had long sideburns. He hung out with a radical group of arhsts and got into trouble ofen. When he was close to graduahon he was expelled for causing problems with the teachers. Not long afer that, he was imprisoned for a short Hme for supposedly opposing the dictatorship of Spain. EXPERIMENTING WITH ART: Salvador conhnued to experiment and study different kinds of art. Eventually, he would concentrate much of his work on Surrealism and become one of the preeminent arhsts of the Surrealist movement. What does that mean? He used "the exachtude of realist painhng techniques to depict imagery more likely to be found in dreams than in waking consciousness.
Surrealism: Surrealism began as a cultural movement. It was started by a French poet named Andre Breton in 1924. The word "surrealism" means "above realism". Surrealists believed that the subconscious mind, such as dreams and random thoughts, held the secret to truth. The movement had an impact on film, poetry, music, and art. Surrealist painhngs are ofen a mixture of strange objects (melhng clocks, weird blobs) and perfectly normal looking objects that are out of place (A lobster on a telephone). SurrealisHc painhngs can be shocking, intereshng, beauhful, or just plain weird like a dream. Dali is the most famous Surrealist arhsts. His ability to shock and entertain made his painhngs popular to many people. Many of today's arhsts have been inspired by Dali's work.
Dali and one of his surrealishc painhngs
The Persistence of Memory In 1931 Salvador Dali painted what would become his most famous painhng and perhaps the most famous painhng of the Surrealist movement. It is Htled The Persistence of Memory. The scene is a normal looking desert landscape, but it is covered with melhng watches.
Dali's art began to gain internahonal fame. He married his longhme love Gala and they moved to the United States in 1940. The Spanish Civil War took place in the late 1930's and then World War II in the early 1940s. So, Dali painted pictures depichng the horrors of war in a surrealishc way.
Another Dali painhng depichng the horrors of war
Religion AFer the war, Dali began to paint about religion. He had grown up in a Catholic family. One of his most famous painhngs during this Hme was Christ of St. John of the Cross which he painted in 1951. In the picture the cross floats high in the sky. You look down from an extreme angle and see a lake with a boat and some fishermen. He said that in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!
Science and Film Dali admired scienhst Albert Einstein and was especially interested in the Theory of RelaHvity, he also appreciated Einstein s genius, creahvity of thought, and eccentricity. He worked with movie director Alfred Hitchcock on the famous film Spellbound. Dali s work, like Hitcock s, was modern and creepy.
He was very ambihous, and ulhmately, had a very long and successful career that spanned decades.
In 1973, afer spending Hme with punk rocker Alice Cooper, Dali said I would like to turn you into a work of art. It s name will be First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper`s Brain.' It was sculpted out of plaster (or something), with a chocolate eclair running down it`s middle and ants crawling all over it. The painter said, This is Dali`s version of Alice Cooper`s brain, to which Cooper replied, Wow, I never thought I`d ever get this. And so the first 3-D hologram was inspired. Weird, right?
As the Hme melts away at the end of the school year, we re going to draw Dali s melhng clocks