Salvador Dali
-Salvador Dalí, 1953
Nothing quite so well defines Salvador Dalí as himself. By that, I mean that Dalí always was and always indefinable. Salvador Dalí is world renowned for his fantastic, perplexing surrealist paintings and art. The image of Persistance of Memory is something that, though not by name, everyone can recognize. His style and key elements (watches, elephants, eggs, ants, etc.) are recognizable by his frighteningly realistic surrealism. His public image: the pointy, waxed mustache and large crinkly eyes are all too familiar. Andy Warhol cites Dalí as one of the great inspirations for Pop Art culture. His art work also stretched beyond his painting into film, costume and fashion, lithography, sculpture, and drawings, to name a few. In his 84 years of existence he seems to have spread to every corner of modernity and art culture possible. Based on the reputation and commendation of his artwork he seems like a god of canvas. However, throughout his life he was met and fought opposition as well as raised more than a fair share of concern and displeasure.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Doménech was born 11 May 1904 and would leave to his eighties. His birthplace of Figueres, Catalonia, Spain was the home of not only his childhood but also his first public exhibition, museum and death. He was always supported by his mother, who passed away when he was sixteen from breast cancer, and encouraged by her to pursue art. He was sent to a drawing school in 1916. After three years, at the age of fifteen, he had his first public exhibition. But it was his mother’s death that most impacted his childhood. He was completely devastated.
The next year he moved away to Madrid where he attended Academia de San Fernando. This was the place where the endlessly talented and egotistical Salvador Dalí would emerge. Even when he arrived he was already an object of attention because of his odd style of dressing as though he were from the 1800s and his friends Pepin Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Frederico Garcia Lorca. This would be the point to introduce the idea of Dalí’s sexuality. Though he had many women as well as a steady wife, he was notorious for sexual advances on nearly anyone, to his ultimate denial. This is present in his college years where many people speculate that he and Lorca had a much more romantic relationship than simply platonic.
However, even those things were not
the most important. It was his work that was most lucrative for his popularity.
In his early years at Academia de San Fernando he experimented in Cubism and
drew much attention from his peers and teachers. He covered a wide range of
styles in the 1920’s. In his work you can often 
see
hints of his classical influence from Raphael, Vermeer, Velázquez, and others
as well as his classic and avant-garde stlye. His talent was undeniable and
even Dalí recognized that he was much more talented than many of his peers. But
when it came time for final exams Dalí made a comment, the exacts of which are
still disputed, that he was more qualified than any of the men whom would judge
his work. This got him expelled. It was at this point in his life when Dalí
would adapt his signature feature – the curly, handlebar mustache.
Dalí’s style was always original. But for the years after his time in Academia de San Fernando he became increasingly more eccentric in his attire. In 1936 he gave a lecture at the London International Surrealist Exhibition while wearing a deep-sea diving suit that needed to be unscrewed when he began gasping for breath. In 1934 he and his wife attended a Halloween party dressed as the Lindbergh baby and it’s kidnapper. Dalí was most comfortable in the spot light and was nearly as famous for his outrageous actions and feats and the way he pushed boundaries as he was for his artwork.
In an ultimate act of surrealism, Dalí partnered with his friend from college, Luis Buñuel, to create a seventeen minute film entitled Un Chien Andalou. The film is a strange picture which opens with a man taking a razor to a woman’s eyeball. He and Buñuel contributed on the script but Dalí claims that he did a large amount of shooting as well. It was around this time that Dalí met his, then married, future wife, Gala. She was a Russian immigrant who was ten years older than he was but she admired his work greatly, particularly after his hailed exhibitions and, what critics called, “paranoiac-critical method”. Dalí often boasted of their affair since she was married to Paul Éluard when he met her. In his book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí he details a romantic affair for years before their marriage and her ultimate split with Éluard in 1934.
Through the 1920s and 1930s Dalí
produced what historians consider to be some of his best work. It was in 1931
that his most famous and iconic painting, Persistence
of Memory, was completed. It is the easiest to use in description of his
constant use of imagery. Common symbols that Dalí used were clocks which he
linked with Einstien’s theory of relativity. He also used eggs to symbolize
love and hope because of it’s connection with the female anatomy. Eggs appear
in many of his works, namely The Great
Masturbator and Enigma of Desire.
What is interesting about his
symbolism, particularly with Persistence
of Memory, is that it evidently changes as his social and political
opinions change. As a boom in
quantum mechanics and scientific ideas came about in the late fifties, Dalí
changed right along with it. His The
Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory is often analyzed as his 
change from being focused on dreams and human thought
and representation to a focus of science and theories. "In the Surrealist period, I
wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the
marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics
has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg." The
symbolism in much of his later work can also be connected to his growing
interest in Christianity. Often times the two coincided and images like Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) were
created from his devotion to Christ and his love of the hypercube.
After
Dalí’s marriage to Gala he met an art dealer in New York who opened his first
exhibition in America. He was an immediate hit. At the same time, Dalí’s
largest patron in Europe was Edward James of London. He was a wealthy business
man who took a shining to Dalí’s work and collaborated with him on the iconic
surrealist object Lobster Telephone and
Mae West Lips Sofa. During these few
years in the early 1930’s Dalí’s once formidable presence in the Surrealist
group was become shaky. It’s leading surrealist, André Brenton, felt that
Dalí’s decision to remain ambiguous about his political views were causing him
to support the “Hitlerian phenomenon”. Though he adamantly denied, he was put
on trial and removed from the surrealist group. André Brenton for the years to
come would criticize and hash Dalí, nicknaming him “Avida Dollars” (a phonetic
spelling of the French avide á dollars
meaning eager for dollars, conveniently also an anagram for Salvador Dalí).
Many surrealist also felt that his work was become less about art itself and
more about money and fame. There was also a tendency to talk about Salvador
Dalí in the past tense, as though he had died. As the world rolled into the
40’s the harsh commentary from nationwide surrealist groups continued and
didn’t stop until even after his death.
It was in 1938 that Salvador Dalí met
Sigmund Freud whom he instantly idolized. He centred much of his work around
human mentality and dream sequences so for him, meeting Freud was like meeting
the Wizard of Oz. Another thing about symbolism – when Dalí walked into Freud’s
house there was a snail on the front gate. In many paintings afterward snails
can be found to represent the head, or the mind.
The 1940’s marked a changing point for the whole
world. When World War II went into full swing Dalí and Gala moved to the United
States. There he began to shift his work into other medium. He created a few
other movie projects, one of which was in collaboration with Roy E Disney on a
film called Destino. He also began in
1941 a set of jewels. Many of them were complex, moving pieces that are laden
with rubies, crystals, diamonds and the like. He also began working with some
Americans on photography, the most famous project being his work with Phillippe
Halsman, Dali Automicus.
It was also in the early forties that
Dalí re-founded himself in Christianity.
He had been born and raised Christian but after he fled WWII in Europe
his work took a turn for the religious. He, himself, also became devoutly
religious and is said to have had an exorcism performed on himself in 1947.
Ironically, he also became fascinated with science and math. His work between
the forties and fifties all tends to incorporate some sort of mathematical
notation or symbolism as well as religious imagery. The surrealists at this
point began to say that his work was getting repetitive and pointless. Many
historians also claim that after Dalí moved to America his quality
decreased. His actual work became
commercial: things like logos, commercials, an autobiography, and a novel).
After WWII was most definitely over Dalí
returned to Catalina where he lived until his death. Though his work became
“repetitive” during this period it was no less icon or virtuously composed.
Pieces like Christ of Saint John on the
Cross show his unyielding talent. His Christian imagery was, however,
almost completely limited to his paintings, which seemed to have declined in
his later years because of his interest in alternative media. After the later
forties the reputation of Dalí’s work seemed to have completely crumbled in
historians mind. A main reason for this was that during the eighties and
nineties a large number of forgeries were created. Another factor was that some
people claim that Dalí’s guardians while he was on his deathbed forced him to
sign blank canvases that would later be painted and sold as originals.
Before Dalí died he constructed the Dalí
Theatre and Museum in Figueres, his hometown. It was there that he stayed when
his health finally began to topple. There are speculations that he had been
poisoned in a drug-laden cocktail in multiple doses by his wife Gala. By the
age of only 76 he was showing symptoms of Parkinson’s and he was confined to
his bed. He completed his final drawing for King Juan Carlos after he changed
Dalí’s official title. That was in 1983, 6 years before he died on 23 January,
1989 in Figueres.
His lasting impression followed him
beyond the grave. In 2002 there was a scandal where the owners of the right to
Dalí’s name made Google remove a logo based on his works. In 2005 the
Philadelphia Museum of Art had a Salvador Dalí exhibition which was so
successful that it’s dates were extended for nearly a month and it was and
currently is the museums highest grossing exhibition.
Regardless of the strange,
self-aggrandizing, obscure nature that encompassed Salvador Dalí, his talent
and craftsman ship is undeniable. His artwork lives in almost every continent
and through every decade. He has been an icon and an inspiration to numerous
art generations. His long-lasting legacy will be a presence and an irrefutably
interesting story that will travel far into the future of art and art history.
