Salvador Dalí Salvador Dalí was born in 1904, and grew to become one of the most famous artists of all time. He was encouraged as a child to practice art, which led to him enrolling in art school. He was expelled, however, and eventually traveled to Paris to meet such influential artists such as Picasso, Magritte, and Miró. This is what sparked his artistic career in the area of Surrealism, which would last his entire life.
He met his wife, Gala, in 1929, and they were soon married. She was his inspiration, and she supported him by taking care of his financial matters. Dalí was infamous for his strange appearance and clothes, as well as his art. This grew to the point where, if one wanted to mail him something, they only needed to draw his iconic mustache on the envelope and it would be delivered. Dalí eventually was "expelled" from the Surrealist movement. Despite this, he continued to paint for the rest of his long life. Salvador Dalí lived until 1989, when he died from heart failure at the age of 84. |
Dalí's artwork is often described as "shocking" or "disturbing". He took his inspiration from his dreams, and even developed a method called the "paranoiac-critical method" for analyzing his dreams and representing them on canvas. The themes of death and decay often are present in his art, as well as symbols like angels, elephants, melting clocks, eggs, bread, and ants. For all of these reasons, Dalí's art was the most famous and the most controversial in the 1900's.
Dalí created many paintings over his lifetime (more than 1500), but his most well-known is The Persistence of Memory (bottom left). This painting, like many others, was inspired by the landscape of Catalonia, where Dalí grew up. The background is typical of Dalí's paintings: simple and without detail, allowing the viewer to focus on the objects at the foreground. The three melting watches located in the painting symbolize the irrelevance of time to Dalí, especially in his childhood home. This painting represents, quite accurately, Dalí's style. It is like a delirious dream, disturbing yet alluring, like so much of Salvador Dalí's artwork is. |