Salvador Dali Overview

Salvador Dali was half-artist, half-imp, and all lunatic. Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories of dream interpretations and the subconscious, Dali sought to depict not visible objects but their associated images and subconscious meanings. For Dali, the life of the mind... [more]

Salvador Dali was half-artist, half-imp, and all lunatic. Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories of dream interpretations and the subconscious, Dali sought to depict not visible objects but their associated images and subconscious meanings. For Dali, the life of the mind was life itself, and the mind at play was a mind frolicking in absurdity and insanity. He used his Old Masterly technique to render content that is grotesque and unnatural, using his creative genius in the service of Dada's anti-aesthetic. He stated that his aim in painting was "to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision...in order that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident...as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality." He painted his dreamscapes and fantastical objects with the precision and naturalism of still life. His most famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory" or "Soft Watches" (1931), presents a barren landscape in which mechanical time has finally stopped and natural time is stuck in a perpetual twilight. He describes it as "nothing else than paranoiac-critical, gentle, and extravagant Camemberts outside of time and space." Dali's wife Gala, muse to the Surrealists and former wife of Paul Eluard, managed his career during their 50-year marriage, reigning in his exhibitionist spirit. Toward the end of his career, however, her influence decreased, and Dalifell prey to business-savvy dealers and secretaries under whose dubious influence he mass-produced cloying, uninspired prints and knick-knacks. [show less]