Artist Salvador ​Dalí

e3 Civic High School

The famous artist Salvador ​Dalí

Art History Research Paper

Mr. ​Sciarratta

Intro Visual Arts & Design

By
Brandon Aboite
 Artist Salvador ​Dalí

Salvador Dalí was best known for his surrealist paintings and influential figures in modern art.

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí and Domenech was born on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small

farming town of Figueres, Spain. They called him the same as his older brother, Salvador, who died of

gastroenteritis at 22 months old. Dalí was told by his family that he might be the reincarnation of his dead

brother, which he believed until his adulthood and even made a painting in 1963 called “Portrait of

my dead brother." Dalí’s first artworks were first exhibited as part of a show in Figueres, Spain at the age

of 14. Dalí’s mother died of cancer when he was only 16 years old, which left an impact in Dalí.

He spent his childhood between Figueres and the summer house of the family in the fishing village of

Cadaqués, where his parents built their first studio of art. In 1914, Dalí begins secondary education at the

Marist Brothers school in Figueres where his interest in art started and influenced particularly by Ramon

Pixtox. Most of all Dalís early work is of landscape genre scenes of peasants and fishermen. Finally, Dalí

was encouraged to develop his creativity and went to study art at an academy

in Madrid.

While as a student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí thoroughly understands a vast number of

artistic styles and showed unusual technical facilities as a painter. In late 1920s, two events brought more

about the development of his mature artistic style and the discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the

importance of subconscious imagery. Dalí began to persuade hallucinatory states in himself by process he

described as “Paranoiac critical” which helped him with his painting style extraordinary rapidity,

and with this it made him the world’s best known surrealist artist. Dalí portrayed objects in extreme detail,

almost painfully realistic and were placed in bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminding of his Catalonian

homeland.

Salvador traveled to Paris in mid 1920s and came into contact with artists such as Pablo Picasso,

René Magritte and Joan Miró, which was what motivated him to make his first surrealist phase. His most

famous work is from 1931, the painting "The Persistence of Memory," which shows the melted clocks in
 Artist Salvador ​Dalí

front of a coastal landscape, he did this painting while in the middle of a hallucination. As an adult, Dalí

lived in Portlligat with his wife in a house they made in the small Empordà town. Where many

of his paintings reflect his love for that land. Dalí always liked to push his boundaries in his personal and

professional life.

In 1923, Dalí was suspended from the academy for criticizing his teachers and starting a riot

among other students in the academy. He later returned in 1926, but got expelled from Special Painting,

Sculpture, and Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid, and refused his final examination by saying

“none of the professors of the school being competent to judge, I retire” from the article Artlistr. Later

Dalí got himself a nickname of “Avida Dollars”, which translates to “eager for cash” since he would draw

on the back of every check that he wrote to pay for dinner, knowing that any restaurant would never cash

in his original artwork.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more academic style with the influence of the

Renaissance painter Raphael. His uncertain political views during the growth of fascism distend his

surrealist colleagues, André Breton called in a meeting to try to have Dalí removed from the surrealist

group and eventually getting removed from the group. He spent much of his time designing theatre sets,

interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry. Dalí also worked closely with Italian designer Elsa

Schiaparelli, and she would create designs based on Dali's Work.

In the period between 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes and

continued to represent childhood memories, also themes centering on his wife, Gala. Later those paintings

were not highly regarded anymore as the artist the earliest art works. His most interesting and uncovering

of Dalí’s books is “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí” published on 1942. He also published a cookbook in

1973 titled “Les Diners de gala”. It had bizarre

recipe items and two recipes that come from the book are “veal cuttlets stuffed with snails” and “Toff

with pinecones.”
 Artist Salvador ​Dalí

Dalí created four covers for the legendary fashion magazine. The first was on December 1938,

where it shows two women. One woman who’s in the foreground has a head formed from flowers, while

the woman who’s in the background has branches flooding from her head. Dalí’s April 1944 design

shows incorporating the word “Vogue” into his art piece, and for the 1971, he did not only design the

cover, but also acted as editor.

“Un Chien Andalou” was only a short preview of Dalí’s cruelty tendencies. It was a great

example for a surrealist film, it shows a woman’s eyeball being cut open along with other graphic and

disturbing scenes. When Dalí was a child he found interest on throwing himself down the stairs, saying

“pain was insignificant” the pleasure he found was immense. He once pushed his childhood friend off a

15-foot bridge, and then sat calmly as he ate cherries while his friend laid injured in the ground.

When Dalí went to the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, he went to the

exhibition wearing an old fashioned-deep sea diving suit to represent his consciousness. During the

lecture Dalí was starting to suffocate in the suit he was wearing, the audience never noticed that Dalí was

suffocating since they thought that his exaggerated gestures were part of the performance, until the poet

David Gascoyne eventually went to rescue Dalí with a wrench to open the suit.

Then leaves Europe in 1948 to settle for good on Portlligat; exhibits at the Galleria l’Obelisco in

Rome; enters into a new phase, which he has no point of contact with postwar avangarde, on the contrary,

he focuses more on the great themes of western traditions. Later designs scenery for Strauss’ Salome at

Covent Garden in London, his interest in harmonic and geometric theory grows, and then returns to New

York.

Dalí initiates “optical art”, looking for optical effects and illusions; Gala and Dalí are married at

the Chapel of Angeles in Spain, then Dalí is presented by the Cuban Ambassador in Paris with the

Médaille a la Qualité Francaise for his sequence of illustrations of Don Quixote. Salvador Felipe Jacinto

Dalí and Domenech dies at the age of 85 on January 23rd.

References

Salvador Dalí: Biography. (2019, March 03.). Retrieved from

https://www.thedaliuniverse.com/en/salvador-dali/biography

Salvador Dali - 6 Interesting Facts • artlistr. (2019, March 03). Retrieved from

https://artlistr.com/salvador-dali-6-interesting-facts/

15 Things You Didn't Know About The Persistence Of Memory. (2018, May 21). Retrieved March 3,

2019, from http://mentalfloss.com/article/62725/15-things-you-didnt-know-about-persistence-memory

Gottesman, S. (2016, June 30). What You Need to Know about Salvador Dalí. Retrieved March 4, 2019,

from https://www.artsy.net/article/the-art-genome-project-what-you-need-to-know-about-salvador-dali