Salvador Dali
SpainBiography of Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was a Spanish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, director, and writer. His place in the history of contemporary art is similar to the perception of his paintings - tangible and clear images are simultaneously full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Based on what is known about his early youth, he was driven by a desire to stand out from his contemporaries, while also wanting to be recognized as a dominant figure with his always correct views. The psychological explanation - which Dalí himself liked very much - could be that he clearly realized his own inferiority, which he needed to compensate for in some way. But if this was the case, where did these feelings come from and how did they develop?
His life in the small Catalan town of Figueres in northern Spain seemed to be happy and typical for someone from a middle-class provincial family. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 2, 1904. His father was a state notary in Figueres. He knew his place in society and, like many Catalans, was an anti-Madrid republican and an atheist. Salvador's mother was also a typical representative of her class. She was a loving wife and a steadfast Catholic who insisted that her family regularly attended church. Both parents loved Salvador and his younger sister Anna-Maria and provided them with the best education available to them at the time.
Soon, Salvador formed a firm belief that his parents loved not him, but his older brother who died in 1903, a year before his birth. This revelation appeared in "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali", a book published in 1976, after the publication of three of his previous autobiographies. Whether this was the consequences of trauma or the fruit of the artist's vivid imagination, who had spent his whole life creating hidden and ambiguous images, the author of the so-called "paranoid-critical method", we can only guess.
Dali was undoubtedly a smart young man, although he liked to claim otherwise. He had a natural talent for drawing, which was reflected in the drawings on the margins of his textbooks and in the caricatures he drew to amuse his sister. His talent was developed by Ramon Pichot, a local impressionist-pointillist artist and a friend of the Dali family.
Most of Dali's youth was spent in the family house near the sea in Cadaques. Here the imaginative boy interacted with local fishermen and workers, absorbing the mythology of the lower classes and studying the superstitions of his people. Perhaps this influenced his talent and became a prerequisite for incorporating mystical themes into his art. According to Anna-Maria, their house was just like all the others. Life seemed happy, although the death of their mother from cancer in 1921 was a huge emotional shock and a heavy blow to the family.
When Salvador turned seventeen, he had already begun to gain recognition in the art circles of Figueres. He left home, persuading his father to help establish his own art studio in Madrid at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, one of the most famous directors of which was Francisco Goya. Salvador Dali went to Madrid in 1922. He was a confident young man, seeking adventure but knowing that a quiet haven awaited him at home. However, this conviction was severely shaken. Four years after his wife's death, Dali's father married the former wife of his deceased brother. Dali considered this a betrayal. Thus was born one of his earliest allegories, based on the story of Wilhelm Tell, whom Dali turned into an Oedipal father wishing to destroy his son. Dali used this theme in some of his paintings for many years. Sometimes he included his wife Gala and Vladimir Lenin, whom Dali considered an inviolable father figure (as the surrealists taught).
In Madrid, Dali met people who had a great influence on his life. One of them was Luis Buñuel, who later became one of the most respected avant-garde filmmakers in Europe for the next half-century. Another great friend of Dali, who had a tremendous influence on him, was Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who soon became one of the most popular playwrights in Spain. He was shot by soldiers of the dictator General Francisco Franco during the civil war. The relationship between Dali and Lorca was very close. In 1926, Lorca's poem "Ode to Salvador Dali" was published, and in 1927, Dali designed sets and costumes for Lorca's play "Mariana Pineda". Both Buñuel and Lorca were part of the new intellectual life in Spain. They challenged the conservative and dogmatic doctrines of the political elite and the Catholic Church, which largely shaped Spanish society at the time. The new ideas stimulated Dali's already radical thinking. This led him to disagree with the methods of the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts, where he began his studies and was expelled in 1926 for inciting riots among students. By this time, he already had his first solo exhibition, held in November 1925 at the Delmo Gallery in Barcelona, where it was warmly received. Most of his works at that time were done in the spirit of exploring new trends prevailing in the artistic world of Paris. He tried himself as an impressionist in "Self-Portrait with Raphael's Neck" (1921-22). The mountains in Cadaques in the background of the painting became a typical landscape motif in Dali's works. Then there was an attempt to create a painting in the style of cubism. Imitating its founders Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Dali painted another self-portrait: "Self-Portrait with "La Publicitat" (one of the Barcelona newspapers). In 1925, Dali painted another Picasso-inspired painting, "Venus and Sailor". It became one of the seventeen paintings exhibited at his first solo exhibition.
Dali had not yet seen the originals of contemporary paintings, although in Barcelona in 1920, there was an exhibition of contemporary art. At that time, magazine reproductions had a great influence on the artist. In 1926, Dali, together with his family, made a trip to Paris, the world center of art. There he visited Picasso's studio. However, Dali did not rush into the next trip to Paris. Perhaps he wanted to understand what he was looking for there. But, as it turned out later, when he had to move frequently to maintain his growing global status, he did not like to change the familiar surroundings of Cadaques and the Costa Brava in Catalonia. Another factor influencing Dali's thinking at that time was his lack of real interest in the development of new aesthetic approaches in painting technique. According to the artist, the perfection of technique achieved by Renaissance artists, as he later confessed to himself deep in his soul, cannot be improved. This assumption was confirmed after a trip to Brussels, which he made during a visit to Paris. The art of Flemish masters with their amazing attention to detail made a great impression on Dali.
When Dali returned to Cadaques after being expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts, he continued to paint in his style. In the painting "Figure of a Girl on a Rock" (1926), he depicted his sister lying on the rocks. At first glance, the canvas seemed to be painted in the style of Picasso, but it did not resemble his works in spirit and was simply a realistic study of perspective.
His second exhibition, held in late 1926 at the Delmo Gallery in Barcelona, was met with even greater enthusiasm than the first. Perhaps thanks to this, Dali's father somewhat reconciled himself to the shocking exclusion of his son from the Academy after which any possibility of making an official career disappeared.
Dali happily returned to his admiration for the masters of the Renaissance and temporarily forgot about Paris. But in 1929, he received an invitation from his friend Buñuel, which the artist could not refuse. He was invited to Paris to work on a surrealist film using images drawn from the depths of the human subconscious. The film was called "Un Chien Andalou".
Now this film is a classic of surrealism. It was a short film created to shock and offend the bourgeoisie and ridicule the extremes of the avant-garde. Among the most shocking scenes is the one that, as is known, Dali came up with, where a man's eye is cut in half with a razor blade. The decomposing donkeys that flashed in other scenes were also part of Dali's contribution to the film.
After the first public screening of the film in October 1929 at the Théâtre des Ursulines in Paris, Buñuel and Dali immediately became famous and celebrated. Two years after "Un Chien Andalou", "L'Age d'Or" was released. Critics greeted the new film with enthusiasm. But then it became a bone of contention between Buñuel and Dali: each claimed to have done more for the film than the other. However, despite the disputes, their collaboration left a deep mark on the lives of both artists and set Dali on the path of surrealism.
Even before Dali's trip to Paris, his paintings already showed surrealistic qualities. In the painting "Woman Figure at the Window", painted in 1925, the artist depicted his sister Anna-Maria looking out the window at the bay in Cadaques. The canvas is permeated with the spirit of the unreality of a dream, although it is painted in a meticulous realistic style. It has an aura of emptiness and at the same time something invisible lurking behind the space of the painting. Moreover, the painting creates a sense of silence. If it were the work of the impressionists, the viewer would feel its atmosphere: would hear the sea or the whispers of the breeze, but here it seems that all life has frozen. The figure of Anna-Maria is isolated, she is in a different world, and her wide backside, a part of the female body that Dali was obsessed with, is devoid of sensuality of the female images of Renoir or Degas.
Most surrealists, such as André Masson, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró, began to explore the subconscious, freeing their minds from conscious control and allowing thoughts to float to the surface like soap bubbles, without any consciously established sequence. This was called "automatism", and in writing, it was reflected in the creation of abstract forms that represented images from the subconscious.
Dali's approach was different. He drew images familiar to the mind: people, animals, buildings, landscapes - but allowed them to merge under the dictate of consciousness. He often merged them in a grotesque manner, for example, turning limbs into fish and women's torsos into horses. In some ways, this somewhat resembled surrealist automatism in writing, where words were familiar because they were used in everyday communication but were arranged in a row freely and without restrictions to express free ideas. Later, Dali would call his unique approach the "paranoiac-critical method". As the artist claimed, he freed himself from subconscious images like a madman. The only difference between him and a madman was that he was not one.
Dali was not yet a member of the surrealist group led by André Breton and Max Ernst, but thanks to his friendship with another Catalan artist and surrealist Joan Miró, he became involved in the new movement that began to have an increasing influence on the artistic and literary circles of Europe.
Breton, who studied to be a doctor and conducted a deep study of Sigmund Freud's works, was the spokesman for the surrealists. From Freud, Breton took and developed the idea that by digging up hidden thoughts at the very bottom of the mind, surrealism could break the chains of European thought and create a new way of life and a way of perceiving it. The first step in this direction was taken earlier by the artistic movement known as Dadaism. The goal of this kind of art was to destroy or make meaningless all existing accepted truths. Among the leaders of Dadaism were Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara. Surrealism gave Dadaism internal content and, according to Breton, helped in destroying the political order. This could not but push Breton towards combining surrealism with communism, which at that time was an elevated ideology aimed at creating a new order in the world.
As for Dali, his interest in this quickly waned. However, despite this, with the support of Miró, Dali was accepted into the ranks of the surrealists in 1929, immediately after his arrival in Paris. Breton regarded this well-dressed Spaniard who wrote puzzle-paintings with some distrust. He did not see the benefit that Dali could bring to their common cause.
1929 was a fateful year for Dali. After completing work on "Un Chien Andalou", which he created together with Buñuel, the artist returned to Cadaques to work on an exhibition of his paintings, which the Parisian art dealer Camille Goemans agreed to organize in the fall. Among the many guests, Dali visited that summer was the poet Paul Eluard, who came with his daughter Cecile and his wife Gala. She soon became Dali's lover and then his wife.
Dali worked a lot. The subjects of many of his paintings were based on his complex issues of sexuality and relationships with his parents. In "The Great Masturbator", the head, like a soft rock on the coast of Cadaques, grows out of a massive boulder. The neck turns into a woman's head, whose lips strive for the unclear genitals on the man's chest. His bloody knees suggest some kind of bloodshed, possibly castration.
This painting became a milestone in Dali's work. In it, he expressed his constant preoccupation with sex, violence, and a sense of guilt. The painting also features a jumble of rocks, which will accompany him throughout his entire career, and such a typical Dali image as a grasshopper - one of the insects that populated his nightmares. Ants crawl along the insect's belly, suggesting corruption. Just below the woman's head is a calla lily, whose yellow pistil in the shape of a phallus grows from soft pale petals. This deeply personal painting is of great importance. It is inspired by Dali's own subconscious.
In another painting of this period, "The First Days of Spring", the artist revels in his sense of freedom. Diagonal lines in the center of the canvas resemble a road or steps leading to the horizon. The figure of a lonely sitting man on the left hints at someone turned away from the rest of the painting, on which, among other things, there is a small photograph of Dali as a child and a woman to whose chest a grasshopper is attached. In the foreground, we see a couple. The man plunges his burning hands into a bucket from which a phallus figure grows.
A similar vignette appears in "Illumined Pleasures", where the woman from the couple has bloody hands.
Dali enjoyed the shock caused by both "Un Chien Andalou" and his paintings. But at the same time, his painting "Sacred Heart" had unwanted personal consequences. In the center of the painting, the silhouette of the Madonna with the Sacred Heart was depicted.
