Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
1904-1989
Salvador Dalí, the Spanish artist who painted the world of dreams and imagination is today synonymous with the Surrealist movement. Born in 1904 into a middle-class family, he studied in Madrid and Paris where he discovered the themes that would remain central to his artistic concerns: metaphysics, psychoanalysis and subconscious desires. Cryptic and often impenetrable, his figurations are populated by human and animal forms, geometric shapes and desolated landscapes, informed by the artist’s signature highly detailed, almost hyperrealist style. Until his death in 1989, Dalí filled his paintings, sculptures and films with otherworldly visions which continue to captivate viewers.
The Surrealist movement will forever be associated with Salvador Dalí, the Spanish painter who most distinctly brought to the canvas the world of dreams and imagination. Known for his technical virtuosity and his deep engagement with psychoanalysis, Dalí’s works vividly and expressively materialise religious, sexual and existential fantasies.
Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueres to middle class parents who immediately recognised and supported his artistic talent. In 1922 he enrolled in the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid only to be expelled four years later, refusing to be examined by teachers he deemed incompetent.
Throughout the 1920s he visited Paris where he befriended André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist group, and encountered various artistic styles including Metaphysics and Cubism. Since then, Dalí’s paintings focused on themes that remained central to his intellectual concerns: the place of man in the universe, sexual symbolism and sensual desires. These motifs, some critics surmise, developed not only from his collaboration with the Surrealist group but also from his traditionally Catholic upbringing.
In his early artworks, influenced by his study of Sigmund Freud, Dalí engaged with his subconscious, introducing in his works bizarre, idiosyncratic images to be interpreted through symbols. In paintings such as ‘Apparatus and Hand’ (1927), Dalí juxtaposes everyday objects and animals, geometric shapes and body parts, often deformed or recombined. These cryptic, impenetrable figurations are portrayed through his signature highly detailed and almost hyperrealist style.
Dalí’s exploration of dreams materialised in his collaborations with cinematographer Luis Buñuel. Together they produced the enigmatic ‘Un chien andalou’ (An Andalusian Dog, 1930) and ‘L’age d’or’ (The Golden Age, 1930), which upset viewers with disjointed montages and violent scenes.
In 1931 he produced what is perhaps his most famous painting, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, which fascinated viewers with its otherworldly landscape and ‘melting watches’. While its meanings are multiple and unclear, the painting’s mysterious landscape, with crawling ants and a misshapen anthropomorphic entity, seems to suggest the impermanence of life.
Dalí continued to display his works in Surrealist exhibitions during the 1930s, despite increasing internal arguments with the group’s members. He was finally expelled from the group in 1939, officially due to his refusal to assume a clear political stance but perhaps also to his eccentricity, which many critics perceived as shallow exhibitionism.
Like many European artists, he immigrated to the United States during World War II and did not return to Spain until 1948. In the American years he designed theatre sets, shop interiors and jewellery as well as held important exhibitions that consolidated his position as an internationally recognised artist. Between the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí produced paintings of scientific, historical and religious themes. The works of this period, which he dubbed ‘Nuclear Mysticism’, convey stereographic visions of the atomic age.
In 1974 he inaugurated the Teatro-Museo Dalí, a museum that permanently displays a vast range of his works, some of which he produced specifically for this setting. Dalí retired in 1980 and died in 1989, his final years spent in seclusion. His fame, however, hasn’t waned; his works are as captivating today as they were at the time of their production. Dalí remains the artist who brought the world disturbing but deeply humane imagery that hails from the deepest part of the collective subconscious.
THE DIVINE COMEDY
Salvador Dalí
To celebrate the 700th anniversary of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in 1950 the Italian government invited Salvador Dalí to create a series of illustrations for an edition of ‘The Divine Comedy’. His signature oneiric, hyperrealistic style, as well as his interest in mysticism and religious visual vocabulary, was deemed perfect for the medieval poet’s grotesque visions of the afterlife.
Dalí proved a controversial choice with the public outraged by the selection of a Spanish artist over an Italian one, as well as the artist’s refusal to condemn fascism. While such outcry forced the government to cancel the project, Dalí continued to produce, between 1951 and 1960, more than 100 watercolours, one for each chapter, with a team of engravers. Dalí worked for five years with the French editors and book publishers Les Heures Claires to produce wood blocks which could recreate his delicate tones and graphic lines to a satisfactory degree.
In his watercolours, Dalí followed Dante’s hallucinated descent into the nine circles of Hell, which brings him into the lower depths of Earth, his climbing of Purgatory and finally his ascent into Heaven. During his journey, he encounters mythical characters, religious figures and personal acquaintances either punished according to the gravity of their sins or exalted for their sanctity. The terrible tortures of the sinners are represented through Dalí’s creative, surreal imagination, which renders such scenes of terror and violence through deformed bodies and nightmarish landscapes. Purgatory’s sense of hope and Heaven’s ineffable beauty and joy is interpreted by Dalí through impalpable colours, soft shapes and blurred contours.
Today, the ‘Divine Comedy’ prints are sought after for their striking visual power and spiritual intensity. With their soft colours and haunting, dreamlike figurations, they represent a lyrical celebration of humanity’s universal hope of salvation.
SCULPTURES
Salvador Dalí
Since the 1930s, Salvador Dalí was a forceful supporter of Surrealist sculpture, which he rebranded as ‘three-dimensional Surrealist Objects’. As opposed to traditional figurative sculpture meant to transmit triumphalist narratives or classical ideas of beauty, the goal of Surrealist objects was to challenge conventional perceptions of space and reality. These artworks were intended to confuse viewers while conveying a whimsical sense of inanity, as Dalí himself once wrote: ‘museums will fast fill with objects whose uselessness, size and crowding will necessitate the construction, in deserts, of special towers to contain them’.
Among Dalí’s early sculptural experiments was ‘Venus de Milo with Chest of Drawers’ (1936), an irreverent mockery of ancient Greek statuary, initially a plaster copy of the original but subsequently reworked into an endless series of varying shapes and materials. Despite his claim that his sculptures were ‘absolutely useless…and created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character’, he also produced functional objects, such as ‘Lobster Telephone’ (1936). Drawing from Duchamp’s readymades, Dalí created compositions that had, for him, powerful sexual connotations.
After World War II, he began producing large editions of sculptures inspired by his most recognisable paintings which replicate the mysterious atmosphere of his canvases. Notable examples are his ‘Profil du temps’ series (1977-84), inspired by the melting watches of ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), and his ‘Elephant’ series (1975-84), whose long, thin legs and round body, heavy with jewels and obelisks, appear in paintings like ‘The Elephants’ (1948).
Over the decades, Dalí also designed furniture, jewels and monumental public sculptures, bringing his dreamlike visions into the real world. In all these objects his overwhelming creative power comes to life in three-dimensional visions, icons of Surrealism which continue to amaze and fascinate viewers.
TAROT CARDS
Salvador Dalí
Always fascinated with mysticism and the occult, in the early 1970s Salvador Dalí undertook the task of creating a set of 78 Tarot cards carrying various symbolic images used to divide past, present and future. Inspired not only by his wife Gala, who was interested in spirituality and the arcane, but also perhaps by the concurrent climate of counterculture and psychedelic imagery, the artist first created the cards in collage, watercolour and gouache, and subsequently issued them into printed editions. Each image, with soft, otherworldly colours and enigmatic juxtapositions of figures and symbols, evoke the traditional Tarot characters while conveying a strong sense of Dalí’s Surrealist aesthetic.
The Tarot’s ancient figurations, as well as the possibility of extrapolating meaning from chance associations and subliminal choices, were a natural site of interest for Dalí who, throughout his artistic career, attempted to free his creative unconscious from the limitations of traditions and reality. In this series he combined these symbols with his own oneiric associations and fanciful references to famous artworks of the past, such as a statue by Bernini and a painting by Delacroix.
Both Dalí and his wife Gala conspicuously feature in the collages embodying traditional Tarot characters. He portrayed himself as a whimsical Magician and King of Pentacles and his wife as an intimidating, powerful Empress. These self-portraits are particularly meaningful since in Tarot reading, cards constitute a mirror into the reader’s past, present and future. Those interacting with the deck are then encouraged to substitute themselves for the artist and his wife, inserting themselves into the mystical revelations.
The popularity of Dalí’s ‘Tarot Cards’ series has not waned throughout the decades. The compelling, enigmatic cards were published as a limited edition in 1984 and commercial copies complete with instruction booklets continue to be issued today.
NUCLEAR MYSTICISM
Salvador Dalí
‘The atomic explosion of 6 August 1945 seismically struck me. Since that time, the atom has become my favourite subject of reflection’. Thus, Salvador Dalí, who had been living in the United States since 1940, expressed the anxieties caused by the violent end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It is perhaps in order to release or cope with these fears that he produced artworks in a style he designated as ‘Nuclear Mysticism’.
Early works from the series are ‘Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll’ (1945) and ‘Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero’ (1947), in which fragmented landscapes display disembodied body parts, classical statuary and hyperrealistic geometrical forms in infinite, angular planes disappearing into the distance. Combining organic matter and artificial, inanimate forms, these works convey Dalí’s fascination with technology and contemporary scientific discoveries.
At the same time, Dalí was investigating ancient spiritual texts, injecting into his artworks the mystical, occult and arcane knowledge of medieval alchemists. The result of these explorations are works such as ‘Leda Atomica’ (1947-49) and ‘Hypercubic Christ’ (1954), based on complex mathematical grounds and traditional Christian imagery.
Throughout the 1950s, Dalí focused increasingly on scientific advances, studying the processes of nuclear fission and fusion, and attempting to represent in painting the explosive powers of atomic splitting, exemplified in the constant recurrence of visual elements such as rocks and particles suspended in space.
The ‘Nuclear Mysticism’ works maintain Dalí’s dreamlike, spiritual compositions, associating them with biomorphic and technological forms which create a grotesque, seemingly infinite landscape. Forms seem to continuously emerge and dissolve on the canvas, generating hallucinated visions which anticipate his later science-fiction paintings. In this diverse body of work, however, remains an ambiguous and indefinable sense of fear and horror that cannot be fully represented, only suggested.
MYTHOLOGIES
Salvador Dalí
Having developed an interest in Greek mythology from his readings of Sigmund Freud, who believed myths of the past conveyed universal manifestations of the human psyche, Salvador Dalí produced between 1961 and 1965 a series of 16 prints on this theme. Featuring in the collection are figures such as Oedipus, Medusa and Narcissus, who Dalí interpreted according to influential psychoanalytical theories about human behaviour and sexuality.
The ‘Mythologies’ series consists of mixed media engravings and aquatints which illustrate the ancient Greek stories with a keen sense of symbolism. In line with Freud’s methods to unlock one’s unconscious, he would start each figuration with an abstract shape, created in a single hand motion, allowing himself to be guided by fate and chance. As the ancient Greek priestess would interpret the Oracle of Delphi from smoke emerging from the sacred cave, so Dalí turned abstract smudges into coherent figurations, rich in symbolic and metaphysical meanings.
These etchings are also particularly well known for the abundance of unusual techniques and tools Dalí utilised in their production. Experimenting not only with chisels, nails and wheels for these plates, he famously represented Medusa’s hair, a nest of snakes, by immersing a dead octopus in acid and imprinting the original image.
The continuous quest to innovate his artistic process and aesthetic signals Dalí’s concern for the production of his own identity, generated, according to his critics, through myths and symbols. The ‘Mythologies’ series can be interpreted, perhaps, as a space in which the artist projected his life, his obsession and his neuroses.
