Friday, March 2, 2012

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was a Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he affixed the Surrealists in 1929 and his excellence for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he practiced exhibitionism and eccentricity. Dali took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. His paintings employed a meticulous academic procedure that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagination. Dali also practiced sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films- Un chien andalou and L'Age d'or. There are museums devoted to Dali's creations in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.
Salvador Dali and his family
Salvador Dali was a great painter, sculpture, graphic artist and designer born on May 11 in 1904 in a small town of Figueres in northern Spain. His full name is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech. His father is Salvador Dali i Cusi was a notary and middle-class lawyer and his mother is Felipa Domenech Ferrés. His mother encouraged his artistic endeavors from his early practicing. He had an older brother named Salvador who was died before nine months of his born. He had also a sister named Ana Maria who also written a book about her brother. In December 1929 he was thrown out of his parental home as his romance with Gala was disapproved by his father and also because of his connection to the surrealists. They married in 1934 in a civil ceremony in Paris. She was the most important person in his life.

Salvador Dali, the prodigy child
Salvador Dali was born as the second son of a prestigious lawyer in the small town of Figueras in Northern Spain. He showed his talent as an artist at an early age. His mother appreciated most to learn drawing. Salvador Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years of old. Ramon Pichot, a well known Spanish impressionist painter who became a art professor at the Municipal Drawing School was the teacher from whom Dali took his first lessons about art. His father also had anchored him a lot. In 1923 his father bought and presented his son his first printing press. In 1922, Dali moved into the Residencia de Estudianets (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid (School of Fine Arts). He was expelled in 1926 and could not take part in the final examinations. He considered him as more qualified than those who should have examined him.
Salvador Dali with an appropriate lady
Salvador Dali was a great lover, being such a lover he won a lady Gala, this is the most important event in his life. She became decisive in his career. She was a Russian immigrant. Though she was married to Paul Eluard and ten years older than Dali, he loved her. They continued their romance without being married until 1934. She got divorce from his husband in 1932 then they married in a civil ceremony in Paris in1934. Gala became his companion, his sexual partner, his muse, his model in lot of his art works. She also was his business manager. Gala was everything in his life. Most of all Gala made his life stabilized. She managed many exhibitions in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and brought him success. However around of 1965, Gala and Salvador was not seen frequently together. But she continued to manage Dali's most of business affairs.
Salvador Dali in USA
In 1933 Salvador Dali had his first one-man show in New York collaborated by his wife Gala. After one year of his visit to the U.S. for the first time supported by a loan of US$500 from Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. To circumvent World War II, Dali chose the America as his permanent residence in 1940. He had a series of spectacular exhibitions then, among the other artists a great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Besides creating a number of great paintings Dali had drawn the attention of the media by playing the role of a surrealist clown. He made a lot of money. Dali became the dearest of the American High Society. Jack Warner or Helena Rubinstein who were the famous celebrity gave him commissions for portraits. His works became a popular trademark and besides painting he anointed other activities - jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel or film making.
Classic Period of creations of Dali
After the Second World War, Salvador Dali and Gala returned to Europe. They spent most of their time either in their residence in Lligat or in Paris or in New York. Dali developed his interest in science, religion and history. He started to integrate things into his art that he had picked up from popular science magazines. Another source of inspiration was the great classical artists of painting like Raphael, Velasquez or the French painter Ingres. Salvador Dali began his series of large sized history paintings in 1958. He painted one monumental painting every year during the summer months in his beloved residence Lligat. 'The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus' the famous one can be seen at the Dali Museum in St.Petersburg in Florida. It is awesome. The artist's late art works collaborate more than ever his perfect and meticulous painting style with his fantastic and limitless imaginations.
Surrealism and Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali went to Paris in 1928. He met there two famous Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. Andre Breton was something like the theoretical 'Schoolmaster' of surrealism in that time in Paris. He worked hard and set himself as the principle person of a group of surrealist grouped around Andre Breton. After one year Breton turned away from Dali accusing him of excessive self-presentation, support of fascism and financial greediness.
By 1929 Dali had found his own method that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recollected during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the great psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Assailing images of burning giraffes and foggy watches became the artist's surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to do his paintings in a nearly realistic-photo style. Whatever Salvador Dali was a great admirer of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.
Dali's paintings and symbolism
Dali employed baronial symbolism in his paintings. The hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is not fixed and also relative. The concept for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dali when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a summer day in August. The elephant is also a recurring image in Dali's paintings which first appeared in his 1944 painting 'Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening'. 'The elephant is a distortion in space', one analysis explains. The egg is another common symbol. He connected the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in The Great Masturbator. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus also symbolized the death and petrification. Locusts are a symbol of waste and fear in his paintings.
Politics, personality and Dali
Salvador Dali's politics played a significant role in his advent as an artist. In his youth, he accepted both anarchism and communism. This was in keeping with Dali's walking to the Dada movement. As he grew older his political commitment changed, especially as the Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of Andre Breton. In his 1970 book Dali by Dali, Dali was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist. During the Spanish civil war Dali fled from fighting and refused to align him with any group. He also evaded to America during Second World War from France. Salvador Dali, a colorful and imposing presence in his, walking stick, haughty expression, ever-present long cape and upturned waxed mustache, was renowned for having said that 'every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali'. It's wondering that when signing autographs for fans, Dali would always keep their pens.
.After 76 years of age, Salvador Dali
In 1980, at the age of 76 years old Dali's health took a catastrophic change. He was forced to retire due to palsy, a motor disorder that caused a permanent trembling and weakness of his hands. He could not hold a brush anymore due to his sickness. This worst happened cause, dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system had been giving him by Gala. In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed him by the title Marquis of Dalí de Púbol in nobility of Spain. Dali also presented the king with his last drawing Head of Europa. After Gala's death on June 10, 1982 he became deeply depressed. He also took attempt to suicide but failed. He then moved to Pubol, a castle bought and decorated especially for Gala. On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde was playing, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84.

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