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Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches.

"More than 100 years after his birth, the art world cannot quite figure out if Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-89), was a genius or a madman!

He was just 14 when his works were first exhibited. At 17, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but was expelled after four years for defying his teachers.

The French Surrealists were then trying to apply the theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali knew of Freud's study of dreams and was fascinated with capturing them in paint.

International acclaim was not long in coming.  In 1933, he put up solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City. He became Surrealism's poster boy.

In addition to Freudian imagery - staircases, keys, dripping candles - he also used his own symbols. His most famous painting "The Persistence of Memory", features three 'melting' watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches is draped on a strange form that is meant to be Dali's deflated head!

As his fame grew, Dali diversified into jewellery, clothes and furniture design, painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller "Spellbound" and set up displays for store windows.

He cut an extremely eccentric figure, with his dashing clothes and moustache. He once showed up for a Paris lecture in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflowers. For a book promotion in New York, he dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed!

In 1974, Figueres in Catalonia, Spain, opened the Dali Theatre-Museum with works donated by him.

PROFILE OF TIME

In Dali's paintings, the concept of time is different, it melts. Everything is fluidic. The Profile of Time, a sculpture by Dali, has the soft watch hanging and drooping from the branch of a tree. The watch appeared for the first time in Dali's 1931 painting ‘The Persistence of Memory'. The watch can be seen to be melting and finishing off as a huge drop.

APPARITION OF FACE AND FRUIT DISH ON A BEACH

The painting by Dali works on illusion. He called them 'double images'. In this, there are three simultaneous images at work in a single painting. Dali's double image paintings had a huge fan following. It is more like a puzzle. Here, one can see an illusion of a face, the image of a dish full of fruits, that of a dog.

Picture Credit : Google 

Surrealism is a movement in art and literature pioneered in France in the early 1920s. Read on to know more about it.

Surrealism is a movement in art and literature that seeks to portray the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams and aims at expressing visions free from conscious rational control. It was pioneered in France around 1924 under the leadership of French poet and critic Andre Breton. Surrealists were influenced by the theories on dreams and the subconscious mind as explained by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian father of psychoanalysis.

Although surrealism was embraced by various kinds of artists like poets, writers, film-makers and photographers, it had its strongest impact in the field of painting. Surrealist artists used techniques like automatism (used by Freud for his patients) which refers to creating art without conscious thought. They believed in the spontaneity of expression, uninhibited by societal limitations. They would paint scenes that make no rational sense. For example, in one of his paintings, Belgian artist Rene Magritte showed a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares a human eye.

Surrealists hailed from different nations but Paris remained the centre of the movement. It petered off with the onset of World War II although many critics still consider it a relevant cultural force.

Picture Credit : Google