http://www.staratel.com/pictures/dali/biogr.htm
About Salvador Dali Introduction
Understanding the place of Salvador Dali in the history of modern art is similar to the perception of his paintings - tangible and clear images are at the same time full of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Judging by what is known about his early youth, he was motivated by a desire to differ from his contemporaries, and at the same time he wanted to be recognized by them as a dominant personality with his always correct views.
The psychological explanation Dali himself liked it very much could be that he was clearly aware of his own inferiority, which he needed to somehow compensate for.
But if this was the case, where did these feelings come from and how did they develop? (36)
His life in the small Catalan town of Figueres in northern Spain seemed to be happy and typical for a native of a middle class provincial family.
The beginning of Salvador Philippe Yahinto Dali and Dominic was born on May 2, 1904.
His father was a notary public in Figueres.
He knew his place in society and, like many Catalans, was an anti Madrid Republican and also an atheist.
Salvador Dali's mother was also a typical representative of her class.
She was a loving wife and a staunch Catholic who, no doubt, insisted that her family attend church regularly.
Both parents loved Salvador and his younger sister Anna Maria and provided them with the best education available to them for that time.
Soon Dali had a firm opinion that his parents did not love him at all, but his older brother, who died in 1903, a year before his birth.
This revelation appeared in the Unspoken Revelations of Salvador Dali, a book published in 1976, after the publication of his three previous autobiographies.
Whether it was the expulsion of the consequences of trauma or the fruit of the vivid imagination of the artist, who all his life created hidden and ambiguous images, the author of the so called process of paranoid critical thinking, we can only guess.
Dali was undoubtedly an intelligent young man, although he liked to say the opposite.
He had a natural talent for drawing, which was reflected in the drawings on the margins of his textbooks and cartoons that he drew to amuse his sister.
38) His talent was developed by Ramon Piho, a local impressionist pointillist artist and a friend of Semidali.
Most of Dali's youth was spent in a family house near the sea in Cadaques.
Here the imaginative boy interacted with local fishermen and workers, absorbing the mythology of the lower strata of society and studying the superstitions of his people.
Perhaps this influenced his talent and became a prerequisite for weaving mystical themes into his art. (41)
As Anna Maria claimed, their house was the same as everyone else.
Life seemed happy, although the death of her mother from cancer in 1921 was a huge emotional shock and a heavy blow for the family.
When Dali turned seventeen, he had already begun to gain recognition in the artistic circles of Figueres.
He left home, persuading his father to help establish his 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 Dalio went to Madrid in 1922.
He was full of the self confidence of a young man looking for adventure, but knowing that a quiet pier awaits him at home.
However, this belief was subsequently greatly shaken.
Influence on Early Creativity and Intrigue Four years after the death of his wife, Dali's father married his brother's ex wife.
Salvador Dali considered this a betrayal.
Thus was born one of his very first allegories, based on the story of William Tell, whom Dali turned into an Oedipal father who wants to destroy his son.
Dali has used this theme in some of his paintings over the years.
Sometimes he included his wife Gala and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whom Salvador Dali considered an inviolable father figure (as the Surrealists taught him).
In Madrid, Dali met people who had a great influence on his life.
One of them was Louis Bunuel, who later became one of the most respected film avant gardists in Europe for the next half century.
Another great friend of Dali, who had a huge influence on him, was Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who soon became one of the most popular playwrights in Spain.
During the civil War, he was shot dead by the soldiers of the dictator General Francisco Franke.
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 the scenery and costumes for the production of Lorca's Mariana Pi Neda.
Both Bunuel 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 mainly formed the Spanish society of that time.
New ideas stimulated Dali's already radical thinking.
44) This led him to disagree with the methods of the Academy of Fine Arts of Madrid, where he began studying and from where he was expelled in 1926 for inciting riots among students.
By this time, he had already had his first solo exhibition, held in November 1925 at the Delmo Gallery in Barcelona, where it was favorably received.
Most of his works at that time were made in the spirit of exploring new trends that prevailed in the art world of Paris at that time.
He tried himself as an impressionist in the "Self Portrait with a neck in the style of Raphael" (1921-22).
The mountains in Cadaques in the background of the painting became a typical landscape motif of Dali's works.
Then there was an attempt to create a picture in the style of cubism.
Imitating its founders Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali wrote another self portrait: "Self portrait with La Publitat" (one of the Barcelona newspapers).
In 1925, Dali painted another painting in the style of Picasso: "Venus and the Sailor".
It was one of the seventeen paintings exhibited at Dali's first solo exhibition.
Salvador Dali has not yet seen anything new the originals of modern paintings, although an exhibition of modern art was held in Barcelona in 1920.
At that time, the artist was greatly influenced by magazine reproductions.
In 1926, Dali and his family made a trip to Paris, the world center of art.
There he visited the studio of Picasso.
However, Dali was in no hurry for the next trip to Paris.
Perhaps he wanted to understand what he was looking for there.
But besides, as it turned out later, when he had to move often to support his growing world status, he did not like to change the usual environment of Cadaques and the Costa Brava in Catalonia.
Another factor that influenced Dali's way of thinking at that time was his lack of real interest in the development of new aesthetic approaches in the technique of writing.
The perfection of technique achieved by Renaissance artists, as he soon admits to himself in the depths of his soul, cannot be improved.
46) This assumption was confirmed after a trip to Brussels, which he made during a visit to Paris.
The art of the Flemish masters, with their amazing attention to detail, made a huge impression on Dali.
When Salvador Dali returned to Cadaques after being expelled from the Academy of Arts, he continued to write in his own style.
In the painting, "The Figure of a Girl on a Rock" (1926), he depicted his sister lying on the rocks.
Outwardly, it seemed that the canvas was painted in the style of Picasso, but it did not resemble his works in spirit and was just a realistic study of perspective.
The second exhibition of Dali's works, held in Barcelona at the Delmo Gallery at the end of 1926, was met with even more enthusiasm than the first.
Perhaps thanks to this, Dali's father somewhat came to terms with the shocking exclusion of his son from the Academy, after which any opportunity to make an official career disappeared.
Salvador Dali returned with pleasure to the admiration of the masters of the Renaissance and for a while forgot about Paris.
But in 1929, an invitation came from a friend of Bunuel, which the artist could not but accept.
He was invited to Paris to work on a surreal film using images caught from the subconscious of a person.
The film was called "The Andalusian Dog".
Now this film is a classic of surrealism.
It was a short film created to shock and touch the bourgeoisie and ridicule the extremes of the avant garde.
Among the most shocking shots there is still a famous scene, which, as you know, was invented by Dali, where a person's eye is cut in half with a blade.
The decaying donkeys that flashed in other scenes were also part of Dali's contribution to the work of creating the film.
47) After the first public demonstration of the film in October 1929 at the Théâtre des Ursulines in Paris, Bunuel and Dali immediately became famous and famous.
Two years after the Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age was released.
Critics received the new film with delight.
But then he became a bone of contention between Bunuel and Dali: each claimed that he did more for the film than the other.
However, despite the controversies, their collaboration left a deep mark on the lives of both artists and sent Dali on the path of surrealism.
A realist and a Surrealist, even before Dali's trip to Paris, surrealistic qualities were manifested in his works.
In the painting "The Figure of a woman at the window", painted in 1925, the artist depicted his sister Anna Maria looking out of the window at the bay in Cadaques.
The canvas is imbued with the spirit of unreality of a dream, although it is written in a meticulous realistic style.
There is an aura of emptiness and at the same time something invisible that lurks behind the space of the picture.
In addition, the picture creates a sense of silence.
If it were an Impressionist work, the viewer would feel its atmosphere: he would hear the sea or the whispering of the breeze, but here it seems that all life has stopped.
The figure of Anna Maria is isolated, she is in another world, and her wide ass, a part of the female body that Dali was obsessed with, is devoid of the sensuality of female images of Renoir or Degas.
Most surrealists, such as Andre Masson, Max Ernst and Joan Miro, began exploring the subconscious by 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 when writing, this 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 connect under the dictation of consciousness.
He often merged them in a grotesque manner so that, for example, the limbs turned into fish, and the torsos of women turned into horses.
49) To some extent, this was somewhat similar to the surreal automatism of writing, where words were familiar, since they were used in everyday communication, but they were lined up freely and without restrictions to express free ideas.
Subsequently, Dali will call his unique approach the "paranoid critical method".
As the artist claimed, he was freed from subconscious images like a madman.
The only difference between him and a madman was that he was not one.
52) Salvador Dali was not yet a member of the group of surrealists led by Andre Breton and Max Ernst, but thanks to his friendship with another Catalan artist and surrealist Joan Miro, he joined a new movement that began to influence the artistic and literary circles of Europe more and more.
Breton, who studied to be a doctor and made an in depth study of the works of Sigmund Freud, was the mouthpiece of the Surrealists.
From Freud, Breton took and developed the idea that by unearthing unspoken thoughts hidden at the very bottom of the mind, Surrealism could break the chains of European thinking 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 purpose of this art form was to destroy or make meaningless all existing generally accepted truths.
Among the leaders of Dadaism were Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara.
Surrealism gave Dadaism an inner content and, according to Breton, helped in the destruction of the political order.
This could not but push Breton to combine surrealism with communism, which was at that time a lofty ideology designed to create a new order in the world.
As for Dali, his interest in this quickly faded.
However, despite this, with the support of Miro, Dali was accepted into the ranks of the Surrealists in 1929, immediately after his arrival in Paris.
Breton treated this dressed up dandy Spaniard, who painted rebus pictures, with a fair amount of distrust.
He did not see the benefit that Dali could bring to their common cause.
The year 1929 was fateful for Salvador Dali.
After finishing work on the "Andalusian Dog", which he created together with Bunuel, the artist returned to Cadaques to work on an exhibition of his paintings, which Camille Goemans, a Parisian art dealer, agreed to arrange in the fall.
Among the many guests of Dali that summer was the poet Paul Eluard, who came with his daughter Cecile and his wife Gala.
She soon became a mistress,and then married.
Salvador Dali worked a lot.
The plot of a large number of paintings was based on his complex problems of sexuality and relationships with his parents.
In "The Great Masturbator", the head, like a soft version of a rock on the coast of Cadaques, grows out of a massive block.
The neck passes into the female head, whose lips tend to the obscure genitals on the man's shoulder.
55) His bloody knees suggest some kind of bloodshed, perhaps castration.
This picture became a milestone in Dali's work.
In it, he expressed his constant concern about sex, violence and guilt.
The picture also features a pile of rocks that will accompany him throughout his work, and such a typical image for Dali as locusts - one of the insects that inhabit his nightmares.
Ants crawl along the abdomen of the insect, which suggests the idea of corruption.
Just below the female head is the calla lily, whose yellow pistil in the form of a phallus grows from soft pale petals.
This deeply personal picture is very important.
It is inspired by Dali's own subconscious.
In another painting of this period, "The First Days of Spring", the artist enjoys his sense of freedom.
The diagonal lines in the center of the canvas look like a road or steps leading to the horizon.
The figure of a man sitting alone on the left hints at someone who has turned his back to the rest of the picture, which, among other things, has a small photo of Dali - a child and a woman with locusts clinging to her chest.
In the foreground we see a couple.
A man puts his burning hands in a bucket, from which the figure of a phallus grows.
A similar vignette appears in "Illuminated Pleasures", where a woman from a couple has bloodied hands.
Salvador Dali enjoyed the shock caused in society by both the "Andalusian Dog" and his paintings.
But at the same time, his painting "The Sacred Heart" caused undesirable personal consequences. (57)
In the center of the painting was a silhouette of the Madonna with a Sacred Heart, Around the silhouette was roughly scrawled: "Sometimes I like to spit on the portrait of my mother."(58)
What may have been intended by Dali as a small advertising joke seemed to his father to be a desecration of the holy memory of his first wife and the mother of the family.
His dissatisfaction with his son's paintings was mixed with disapproval of Dali's connection with Gala Eluard.
60) As a result, the father forbade Dali to ever visit the family home.(61)
According to his subsequent stories, the artist, tormented by remorse, cut off all his hair and buried it in his beloved Kadakes.
Gala Eluard (born Russian Elena Deluvina Diakonova) was the mistress of Max Ernst, the founder of Dadaism, and then Surrealism, even when she became the wife of the French poet Paul Eluard.
Her meeting with Salvador Dali in the summer of 1929 was fatal for both of them.
Gala, who was almost ten years older than him, seemed to Dali a refined, self confident woman who had been moving for a long time in the highest artistic circles of Paris, while he was just a simple young man from a small provincial town in northern Spain.
At first, Dali was struck by the beauty of Gala and burst into embarrassed hysterical giggles when they talked.
He didnot know how to behave in front of her, although he secretly admitted that she turned him on.
In turn, Gala was confused by this tense young man and his preoccupation with masturbation and castration.
When Paul Eluard returned alone to Paris, Dali and Gala found a way out of the current problematic situation in sex.
"The first kiss," Dali wrote later, " when our teeth collided and our tongues intertwined, was only the beginning of the hunger that forced us to bite and gnaw each other to the very essence of our being."
Such images often appeared in Dali's subsequent works: chops on the human body, fried eggs, cannibalism - all these images remind of the violent sexual liberation of a young man.
When the couple first ran away together, they locked themselves in their room at the chateau of Cary le Rouet near Marseille and cut themselves off from the rest of the world.
This flight lasted all their married life, even when Dali became infamous.
Gala - whose reaction to Dali's violent passionate love was, as they say, the words: "My boy, we will never part" - became for him not just a mistress satisfying his passion.
When she eventually left her husband and moved to Dali in 1930, she proved to be an excellent organizer, business manager and patroness.
And when they finally got married in 1934, Gala's ex husband Paul Eluard was one of the witnesses at the wedding ceremony.
To express his feelings for this amazing woman, Dali depicted her in the form of Gradiva, the heroine of the popular novel by William Jensen, where Gradiva appears as an animated statue from Pompeii, with which a young man fell in love, which ultimately changed his life.
In the painting "Gradiva rediscovers anthropomorphic ruins" against the background of rocks, which the artist was inspired to paint by the rocky landscape of the Costa Brava, Gradiva is depicted in the foreground, the model for which was Gala, shrouded in a rock on which there is an inkwell, perhaps as a hint to her ex - husband, the poet.
A lasting Memory The image of a deserted coast read stuck in Dali's mind at that time.
The artist painted a deserted beach and rocks in Cadaques without any specific thematic focus.
As he claimed later, the void was filled for him when he saw a piece of camembert cheese.
The cheese became soft and began to melt on the plate.
This sight caused a certain image in the artist's subconscious, and he began to fill the landscape with melting clocks, thus creating one of the most powerful images of our time.
Dali called the picture "The Permanence of Memory".
"The Persistence of Memory" was completed in 1931 and became a symbol of the modern concept of the relativity of time.
In addition, the picture causes the viewer to have other deeply hidden feelings that are difficult to determine.
A year after the exhibition at the Pierre Colet Gallery in Paris, Dali's most famous painting was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Unable to visit his father's house in Cadaques because of his father's ban, Dali built a new house on the seashore, near Port Ligat, with the money received from the patron of the arts, Viscount Charles de Noeil, for the sale of paintings.
Remaining true to his instinct, the artist reluctantly parted with his beloved coast and family nest.
Now Dali was more convinced than ever that his goal was to learn to write like the great masters of the Renaissance, and that with the help of their technique he would be able to express the ideas that prompted him to draw.
Thanks to meetings with Bunuel and numerous disputes with Lorca, who spent a lot of time with him in Cadaques, new broad ways of thinking opened up for Dali.
He began to create paintings of three themes: the legend of William Tell, Millet's "Angel" and Freud's subconscious world.
Wilhelm Tell and Lenin For Dali, Wilhelm Tell symbolized the complete rupture of the symbolic umbilical cord that connected him with the house and everything that was connected with it in terms of totems and taboos.
The artist's first painting dedicated to this topic was simply called "Wilhelm Tell" (1933).
In the same year he wrote "The Riddle of William Tell".
In it, the legend of William Tell is mixed with the life of Lenin.
Dali had already painted a picture in 1931 using the image of Lenin: "A partial hallucination: the appearance of six heads of Lenin on the piano", where the head of the Russian revolutionary is depicted in a shining halo on the piano keyboard in a dark room.
There is only one father in the room, contemplating something.
His hand rests on the back of a chair with cherries.
This is a subconscious image of Dali's punishment in childhood, his father's fear and the memory of a plate of cherries in the punishment room.
In the picture" The Riddle... "
Lenin's surprisingly long buttock is supported by a crutch, while another crutch supports the long visor of his cap.
On the ground, which is about to be broken by Lenin's foot, there is a child in a baby carriage.
Lenin, obviously, is also holding a child with a cutlet on his head, which he is likely to eat.
The general meaning of the picture is that the child is in danger from the father figure, and perhaps it expresses Dali's feelings for his father and for the Surrealists, whose rules began to oppress him.
Some surrealists saw the painting as an insult to Lenin and tried to destroy it.
But Breton and other important members of the movement did not care much about this.
From their point of view, more important was Dali's lack of devotion to their political course and what they considered a freedom in art: his visual puzzles and his obsession with jokes.
Dali's newfound confidence in himself and in his work appeared thanks to a relationship with Gala, a woman who completely satisfied him.
But he was not so blinded by love that he did not see another meaning of their connection.
He expressed this in his new mythology of the Angel, the most famous painting by the French artist of the nineteenth century, Jean Francois Millet.
This famous painting, much loved by Victorians for the noble feelings that permeate it, depicted a peasant and a peasant woman bowing, as if during prayer, after work.
In his works, Dali gave a completely different interpretation of the Millet scene.
The woman has become like a bird of prey, she does not give thanks for the work that gives them daily bread every day, but is going to attack her companion and eat him.
Millet's" Angel " actually appears in Dali's painting "Gala and the Angel "by Millet shortly before the phenomenon of conical anamorphosis ("anamorphosis" - image distortion, often optical), written in 1933.
Here the Gala is depicted in a room, in the doorway of which there is a figure of a sitting Lenin.
Maxim Gorky with a lobster on his head looks out from behind the door.
Millet's "Angel" hangs over the door, so again the two mythologies are merged together.
"Surrealism Se Mua" Marrying Gala awakened in Dali an inexhaustible imagination and a new inexhaustible energy.
61) A fruitful period began in his work.
At this time, his personal surrealism completely prevailed over the norms and attitudes of the rest of the group and led to a complete break with Breton and other Surrealists.
Now Dali did not belong to anyone and claimed: "Surrealism is se mua" ("Surrealism is me").
63) In addition to his research, Dali began to use the dual image technique, in which objects could be considered as one or as two objects.
One of the simplest whists for this new field was "The Ghost Cart" (1933), where two passengers crossing the Ampourdan Valley near Cadaques on a covered cart drawn by a horse also turn out to be the towers of a distant city, and the wheels look like sticks sticking out on both sides of the road.
In the left corner of the picture there is a broken amphora, a hint that the destroyed Roman city of Ampurias is located near Ampurdan, which is also present in another mysterious picture called "The Chemist of Ampurdan in search of absolutely nothing" (1936).
Now Dali had several ways in which he could release inspiration from the subconscious: the Freudian - sexual theme, the paranoid - critical method, in which he thoroughly stirred his thoughts like a madman in delirium, and the theories of modern physics.
Having freed himself from the threads that bound him to the limited world of his home, he was a free wandering explorer of the universe created by himself.
65) The last daring look at childhood was reflected in the film "The Ghost of Sexual Attractiveness" (1932), where a young Dali in a sailor suit against the familiar landscape of the Costa Brava looks at a female figure kneeling and supported by crutches, whose breasts and stomach are made of gray stone bags.
The woman's head passes into the cliff behind her.
Gala was also almost always present in his paintings and sketches for paintings.
For example, in the painting "A dream puts its hand on a person's shoulder" (circa 1932), it is depicted in the form of a dream, whose head is made of flowers.
As if to confirm his personal orientation, Dali wrote a frank "Portrait of Gala" (1935), where the "Angel" appeared again.
Here, however, the foreground is filled with Gala's back.
She is fully dressed and looks at herself sitting on a wheelbarrow with an "Angel" over her head.
This painting, filled with the calm and balance of the Dutch interior, is a statement about the relationship between Dali and Gala, to whom the artist was grateful for her help in achieving "the sublime transition of bad into good, madness into order" and for making their contemporaries accept and share his special madness.
Despite the infidelities, the relationship between Gala and Dali remained very important for the artist and until the death of his wife in 1982 was an integral part of his life and an important factor in earning a living.
Her feelings towards him are less clear.
She never expressed her views and opinions, but she had a huge influence on Dali even when, according to rumors, she had several other lovers.
It was noticed that the husband himself encouraged his wife's infidelity, arranging, as they say, orgies with various sexual perversions.
These statements, like most of Dali's personal life, are usually only assumptions based on published stories and his reputation - but they must be based on real facts.
Paranoid Critical Method A characteristic feature of the great figures of modern art is that they are convinced that they have a personal view of reality, and thanks to this belief they leave their imprint on the world consciousness.
Many expressed this confidence with the help of their own visual language, creating a modern writing technique for the development of individual means of expressing feelings and ideas - without resorting to literary explanation.
However, Dali did not pursue such goals.
68) After a brief encounter with the technique of pointillism, cubism and the style of his fellow Catalan Joana Miro, he decided that he was more interested in the content of the paintings, for the expression of which the technique of such great masters as Botticelli and Velasquez was quite enough.
However, what he wanted to say remained to some extent a mystery both for the audience and for Dali himself, which, however, did not prevent him from creating strong images that are not inferior in their expressiveness to the courtiers of Philip IV Velasquez or the clouds and weather of Turner.
Dali's path to artistic expression lay through the liberation of ideas hidden in the human consciousness, especially in his own, which was a mysterious world of memory and life experience, sometimes real, sometimes invented, but distorted with the help of a magnifying glass of his phantasmagoric vision.
70) Dali called the new method of studying pictorial subjects the paranoid critical method.(71)
This method is the only way to get what he called irrational knowledge and explain it.
The artist was firmly convinced that in order to release deeply hidden thoughts, the mind of a madman or someone who, because of his so called madness, would not be limited by the guardian of rational thinking, that is, the conscious part of the mind with its moral and rational attitudes, was necessary.
A person who was in such a delirium, Dali argued, was not limited or constrained by anything and therefore simply had to be crazy.
However, as Dali assured his viewers, the difference between him and a madman was that he did not go mad, therefore, his paranoia was associated with a critical ability.
This paradoxical statement became the foundation of Dali's work and created a sense of indisputable statement and ambiguity in his works.
The uncertainty stimulated the imagination of viewers accustomed to the world of calm landscapes, portraits or groups of classical nudes.
77) Their interest was attracted and excited by puzzle pictures with frequent erotic and bestial hints.
In a world that usually depended on soothing labels as props for reality, Dali's approach was a public insult and incentive.
78) The sexual nature of his works, with frequent hints of castration, masturbation and sodomy, challenged not only society, but also the art establishment, which he despised for the progress of technical enlightenment that distinguished twentieth century art at that time.
The key to Dali's world was Sigmund Freud, whose research of subconscious sexual traumas in his patients with the help of psychoanalysis opened the doors of the human soul wide.
79) This was as shocking and incredible an event as the discovery of Charles Darwin half a century ago.
For Dali, the discovery of the subconscious had three advantages: this gave rise to new themes for paintings, allowed them to explore and explain some of their personal problems, and was the explosive that could destroy the old order. (80)
In addition, it was an excellent means of advertising creativity.(81)
His first attempt to give the idea a tangible form was the painting "The Invisible Man", which he began in 1929.
However, the work was not completed until 1933.
In this picture, the figure of a man is hidden behind a lot of architectural details and other objects, phallic symbols, characteristic evidence of Dali's fear of castration.
Dali laid the idea of the existence of a whole world of the subconscious in 1936 in his work "The Suburbs of a paranoid critical city: Noon on the Outskirts of European History".
At first glance, this picture shows a typical city.
Annoying details do not immediately cause a feeling of surprise and shock.
However, soon the viewer begins to understand that the perspectives of the individual parts of the picture are not connected with each other, which, however, does not violate the unity of the composition.
The depicted city seems to have emerged from a subconscious dream and has a certain meaning until the viewer begins to critically examine it.
In addition to the details inherent only in dreams, events occur in different parts of the city that are not related to each other in any way, but are the real fruits of Dali's memory.
Gala holds a bunch of grapes, which echoes the partial figure of a horse and a classic building in the background, which, in turn, is reflected in a toy house placed in an open chest of drawers.
In general, the finished, but disjointed plot is explained in the subtitle of the title of the picture: this is really the story of Europe that has passed halfway, breathing nostalgia, regret.
Art Objects Dali's desire to be recognized in a society that, in fact, was indifferent to art, especially modern art, caused him to have a natural tendency to attract attention to himself.
It was at this time, around the mid 1930s, that the artist began to create surreal objects, which became his most famous works.
He made a bust out of a barber's mannequin, putting a French loaf and an inkwell on it.
This was followed by a shocking and provocative aphrodisiac tuxedo, hung with wine glasses.
His other memorable works were "Telephone Lobster", a composition created in 1936, and the shocking "Mahe West Sofa" (1936-37): a wooden frame covered with pink satin.
But it was not these strange objects that attracted the most attention to Dali, but his lecture at the London Group Rooms, Burlington Gardens in July 1936.
This lecture was held as part of the International Exhibition of Surrealists.
The artist appeared in the costume of a deep sea diver.
The costume was suitable for immersion in the subconscious and was met with noisy applause.
90) However, when Dali began to choke and began to gesticulate frantically, the applause was replaced by fear and confusion.
This was not exactly what Dali intended, but the attention of the general public was attracted to the first exhibition of surrealist works held in London, at the Cork Street Gallery.
The exhibition, which is very popular, was held by the American collector Peggy Guggenheim.
In addition to advertising the exhibition, the incident with the diver's suit attracted the attention of the publishers of Time magazine: his photo was placed on the cover of the last issue of 1936.
Under the photo taken by Man Ray, there was the following comment: "A burning pine tree, an archbishop, a giraffe and a cloud of feathers flew out of the window."
92) Miss Guggenheim became the second patron of Dali from the rich New York patrons of artists (before that, he lectured on Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935).
Soon these patrons became his most ardent supporters.
Surrealist Celebrity After returning from his next trip to the United States in 1937, where he visited Harpo Marx in Hollywood and took part in the work on the script of the film, Dali participated in another international exhibition of surrealists, this time in Paris.
Now he has created a surreal composition "Rainy Taxi".
It was a taxi with a naked mannequin (such as are usually displayed in shop windows) in the back seat.
His body was covered with live snails.
In addition, water was pouring into the cabin from holes in the roof.
The work caused a lot of noise and the anger of critics.
98) Dali reconciled himself to his new status of personality, which was expressed in his significant picture "Metamorphoses of Narcissus" (1936-37).
It was his most successful painting of that period with two images.
At first glance, it seems that it depicts the limbs of two figures on a normal background.
But then you can notice that the limbs in the left part of the picture belong to the figure of a man partially hidden in the shadow and looking into the water, which reflects his image - the image of a Narcissus.
On the right is a set of similar shapes, but now the limbs are fingers holding an egg, from the cracks of which a narcissus flower grows.
The myth of Narcissus is interpreted here by Dali as the story of his own transformation through Gala.
The self absorbed young man, previously preoccupied with masturbation and castration, has now become a member of a normal sexual union, depicted in the background of the painting in a style reminiscent of the active world of Renaissance works.
Even the chessboard was borrowed from a Bellini painting.
Art and the Civil War Dali's return to Spain after the London exhibition of Surrealists in 1936 was prevented by the civil war, which began with the uprising of General Franke and his loyal troops against the people's government.
The government was forced to flee to Valencia, and then, when the city began to be threatened, to Barcelona, Dali's Catalan homeland.
Dali's fear for the fate of his country and its people was reflected in his paintings painted during the war.
Among them is the tragic and terrifying " Soft construction with boiled beans: a premonition of civil War "(1936).
The feelings expressed by Dali in this picture are comparable to the stunning" Guernica " by Picasso.
But it is less in line with public taste because of its obvious sexual overtones.
The picture is dominated by a fragment of a naked female body.
The chest is cruelly squeezed by a knobby hand.
The audience was indeed more horrified by Dali's realism than by the symbolic abstractions of Picasso's painting.
In addition, Dali managed to find a strong image expressing the horrors of war, symbolized by simple boiled beans the food of the poor.
In addition, behind the crooked hand in the foreground, we see a small bent figure - the figure of a simple man, depicted by the artist and in "The Chemist of Ampurdan in search of Absolutely Nothing" as a symbol of the nihilism of modern life.
Although Dali often expressed the idea that the events of world life, such as wars, had little to do with the art world, he was greatly concerned about the events in Spain.
He expressed his persistent fears in "Autumn Cannibalism" (1936), where intertwined fingers eat each other.
The artist's horror is softened here by the familiar landscape of Kadakes in the background as an expression of the idea that such events, even the civil war, are transitory, but life still goes on.
Dali's commentary on the Spanish Civil War was called simply "Spain".
The picture was painted in 1938, when the war reached its climax.
This ambiguous, paranoid critical work depicts the figure of a woman leaning her elbow on a chest of drawers with one open drawer, from which a piece of red cloth hangs.
The upper part of the woman's body is made of small figures, most of which are in militant poses, reminiscent of the groups of Leonardo da Vinci.
In the background, a deserted sandy plain is depicted.
Many of Dali's friends became victims of the civil war in his homeland.
Out of habit, he tried not to think about the bad things.
One of the ways to forget was the anesthesia of the mind, for which sleep was ideal.
This is reflected in the painting "Dream" (1937), where the artist created one of the most powerful images.
The head without a trunk rests on flimsy supports that can break off at any moment.
In the left corner of the picture there is a dog, which is also supported by a prop.
On the right, a village grows up, similar to one of the villages of the Costa Brava.
The rest of the painting's space, except for a distant small fishing boat, is empty, symbolizing the artist's anxiety.
In another group of paintings, where Dali's concern about the clearly approaching world war was manifested, a telephone theme was used.
In "The Riddle of Hitler" (circa 1939), a telephone and an umbrella are depicted on a deserted beach.
The picture hints at the unsuccessful meeting of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Adolf Hitler.
Both in the "Sublime Moment" and in the" Mountain Lake", written in 1938, the artist used (in addition to the phone) the image of a crutch, a typical symbol of bad forebodings for Dali.
During the Spanish Civil War, Dali and Gala visited Italy to see the works of Renaissance artists that Dali most admired.
They also visited Sicily.
This trip inspired the artist to write " African Impressions "(1938).
The couple returned to France, where there were rumors of an imminent war in Europe, and found time to visit the United States again in the first half of 1939.
The inexorably impending horror worried Dali.
Immediately after the outbreak of war in September 1939, he left Paris and went to Arcachon, which is on the sea coast south of Bordeaux.
From here, Gala and he moved to Lisbon, where, among those fleeing from the war, they met the famous designer Elsa Schiaparelli, for whom he had already designed dresses and hats, and the film director Rene Clair.
The anagram "Avida Dollars" was made in 1941 from the name of Salvador Dali by Andre Breton as a mockery of Dali's vanity about making money.
But it concealed something much more than a pang of envy caused by the growing success of Dali, whose rise began in 1936, and the surprisingly warm reception given to the artist in the United States by both rich patrons and ordinary viewers.
In the artistic circles of Europe, Dali was not considered a serious contender for the crown of an aesthete, since he was immersed in exoteric theories of art.
But in the USA, where art was still guided by traditional attitudes and millionaires and business kings were hunting for traditional European art, Dali was greeted with enthusiasm.
His paintings, although with mysterious content, were accessible to visual perception, since they depicted understandable objects, so this impulsive personality, repelled everywhere and irritating everyone in Europe, was accepted in the United States, which was proud of its frank, firm character, comprehensive personalities and showmen.
Dali and Gala reluctantly left Europe, but soon settled comfortably in Friedriksburg, Virginia, at Hampton Manor, in the house of Kareya Crosby, an avant garde publisher.
Here Gala began to build a cozy nest for Dali, having requisitioned the library and ordered the necessary accessories for painting from the nearby city of Richmond.
The writer Anais Nin, who was present there, watched and later recalled her troubles.
A year later, Dali and Gala moved with Mrs. Crosby across the United States to Monterey, near San Francisco, California.
The house in this city became their main refuge, even though they lived for a long time in New York, basking in luxury.
During the eight years spent by Gala and Dali in America, Dali made a fortune.
At the same time, according to some critics, he paid for his reputation as an artist.
In the world of artistic intellectuals, Dali's reputation has always been low.
He not only behaved provocatively, which brought him some advertising dividends, but was considered by art lovers as a simple antics to attract attention to his works.
He has not yet worked in the existing art directions.
More broadly, most artists and amateurs saw the art of that time as a search for a new language with which modern society and all the new ideas that are born in it would find their expression.
The old technique, both in literature and in music or plastic arts, in their opinion, was not suitable for the twentieth century.
It seemed to many that the traditional style of Dali's writing was not combined with the work of searching for a new language of painting, which was reflected in the paintings of such masters of the twentieth century as Nicasso and Matisse.
However, Dali had followers among European art lovers, especially those who were interested in the Surrealist movement, who saw in his works a unique way of expressing hidden parts of the human spirit.
105) American Incidents Dali during his stay in America participated in numerous commercial projects: in the theater, ballet, jewelry, fashion, and even published a newspaper for self promotion (only two issues were published).
As the number of projects grew over time, he seemed more like a mass entertainer than a serious artist engaged in the study of expressive means.
Although his popularity grew, Dali began to lose, at least in Europe, the support of art critics and historians, on whom the artist's reputation depended throughout his life.
From his safe haven in Virginia, and then in California, Dali began a triumphant conquest of the art world of a new continent. (106)
American friends were ready to continue to help the artist in his career.
One of his first orders was the design of the Venus Dream pavilion at the International New York Exhibition in 1939.
Dali planned to build a swimming pool inside the pavilion, in which he intended to place the mermaids.
On the facade, he wanted to depict the figure of Venus in the style of Botticelli, but with the head of a cod or similar fish.
The management of the exhibition did not approve these plans, and the pavilion was not built, but Dali had the opportunity to publish his first American manifesto: "Declaration of the independence of the Imagination and the rights of man to his own madness".
The case of Bonuit Teller occurred before the incident with the International Exhibition.
111) Dali ordered the design of the windows of the Bonuit Teller department store in New York. (112)
Dali fulfilled this order in his inimitable extravagant style, exposing a black satin bath and a canopy made of a buffalo's head with a bloody pigeon in his teeth.
This composition attracted so many people that it was impossible to walk along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue.
The administration closed the composition.
This upset Dali so much that he turned the bathtub over, breaking the mirror glass of the window, and went out through it to the street, where the New York police arrested him.
116) Gave a suspended sentence.(117)
This attracted so much attention to his personality that his next exhibition at the New York gallery was a huge success.
Such cases, sometimes shocking, created a good advertisement for Dali among the ordinary public, who saw in the artist the embodiment of personal freedom, which the United States was so proud of and which, as he stated, can be found only in America (that is, not in Europe).
119) When some journalists questioned Dali's sanity and the expediency of his antics, he accepted the challenge.
Responding to an article in Art Digest asking if he was just a madman or an ordinary successful businessman, the artist replied that he did not know himself where the deep, philosophical Dali begins and where the crazy and absurd Dali ends.
120) The World of Works All this was part of the spirit of the New World of that time and made Dali a popular product outside the field of dealers and art galleries.
He has already developed models for Elsa Schiaparelli.
Now he began to invent more fantastic fashion items that got on the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and won him popularity among the rich and refined public.
The Marquis de Cuevas, the founder of the Monte Carlo Ballet, also introduced Dali to his world by ordering the design of the stage for the "Bacchanal" with costumes from Coco Chanel.
Other orders for the design of the stage for the ballet from the Marquis de Cuevas were " Labyrinth "(1941) with choreography by Leonid Massin," Sentimental Conversation, a Chinese cafe "and" The Destroyed Bridge " (1944).
In New York, the St. Regis Hotel became the haven of Dali and Gala, where the artist created his studio.
There he worked on portraits of Mrs. George Tate II, Elena Rubinstein, the queen of cosmetics (Dali also worked on the design of her apartment), Mrs. Luther Green.
In addition, Dali was again involved in working on films.
He enthusiastically welcomed this way of self expression, in which he saw the kingdom of creativity of the future, despite the fact that later he belittled the contribution of cinema to art.
It was he who created the famous surreal dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Enchanted" in 1945.
Hitchcock wanted to create the first film about psychoanalysis at a time when the teachings of Freud began to have a profound influence on the thinking of Americans, so God himself told him to turn to Dali.
The following year, the artist began working on the Walt Disney project "Destino", which, unfortunately, was not completed.
Only one more full length film was created based on Dali's script "Don Juan Tenorio", made in Spain in 1951.
Dali, as a rule, liked active activity, and together with Gala, who was constantly near him, he became known throughout the United States of America as the king of modern art.
He even found time to write a novel "Hidden Faces" about a group of aristocrats on the threshold of the Second World War.
Anxiety and Seduction, meanwhile, large sums were laid out for Dali's paintings.
Their popularity was partly due to the fact that they looked like the works of old masters, carefully and conscientiously made.
It was also important that they were written by a person, although sometimes eccentric during his appearance in public, but cute, well mannered, well dressed and most likely not a revolutionary or a communist.
Such a significant work by Dali as "The Slave Market with the disappearing bust of Voltaire", written in 1940, was filled with echoes of the latest European paintings.
The picture looks like a scene with a half naked Gala in the lower left corner.
She looks at a group of characters against the background of a destroyed building.
Among the figures, two women in Dutch dresses stand out, which, thanks to the artist's excellent ability to create dual images, are also a bust of Voltaire by the sculptor Houdon.
Behind them are the slaves depicted in dark colors, which are mentioned in the title of the picture.
They indicate the mood of Dali, Full of Voltaire's self doubt, before the influence of Gala gave him freedom and self confidence.
Another picture, indicating that Dali did not feel completely free away from the familiar landscape of the Costa Brava, is called "A dream caused by a bee flying around a pomegranate a second before waking up".
In this painting, painted in 1944, Dali depicted Gala lying on a stone slab.
The work resembles the portraits of his sister Anna Maria, painted in Cadaques.
One tiger jumps on the Gala, the other is devoured by a fish.
All this is a typical nightmare for Dali.
The whole picture seems a little light, like advertising graphics.
The picture suggests that Dali temporarily lost touch with the subconscious layer of his inspiration.
However, it was soon restored when the artist took part in a competition for the best picture for the film "Bel Ami" (translator's note: "bel ami" - in French means "dear friend"), organized by Loev Levin Studio os.
The subject of the painting was supposed to be the temptation of St. Anthony.
And although Max Ernst won the competition, the artist had new ideas reflected in a new series of paintings.
In The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) Dali placed the saint in the lower left corner.
Above it floats a chain of elephants, led by a horse.
Their long, dangling, stilt like legs make them look like balloons.
Elephants carry temples with naked bodies on their backs.
Apparently, the artist wants to say that temptations are between heaven and earth.
Now the meaning is not so difficult to understand, because for Dali, sex was akin to mysticism.
Another key to understanding the picture lies in the decent appearance on the cloud of the Spanish El Escorial, a building that for Dali symbolized law and order achieved through the fusion of the spiritual and the secular.
Thus ,the "Temptation of St. Anthony" is the key that opens the cosmos of Dali, as this picture confirms the artist's growing interest in the world of spirituality and matter.
The roots of this dualism lie in Dali's family upbringing in provincial Figueres.
The new vision of the world, as Dali claimed, was born in a flash of enlightenment, which was another consequence, besides the roar and radioactive glow, of the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Dali was looking for a mystical answer in the black clouds raised by the explosion.
An absolute vision of the meaning of all this should be granted, as he believed, by the grace of God and the grace of truth.
The idea of God's mercy was nurtured in him as a child during his religious upbringing.
As for the grace of truth, the artist hoped to find it in the discoveries of modern physics.
Although Dali's ideas about life, God and modern science began to mature in the artist's brain back in the United States and began to manifest themselves in his works of that period, they finally matured and began to bear fruit only after returning home to Kadakes in 1948.
The brain of the Mystic Dali was so shocked by the atomic bomb that he wrote a whole series of paintings dedicated to the atom.
The first of this series was the "Three Sphinxes of Bikini Atoll", created in 1947.
"Sphinxes" are three mushroom shaped bodies, similar to a mushroom cloud formed after the explosion of this weapon of mass destruction.
The first mushroom in the foreground grows out of the woman's neck like a cloud of hair, the second one appears in the center and looks like the foliage of a tree, the third, the most distant, cloud rises from behind the landscape of Kadakes.
This was the first work from a series of paintings and drawings, with them Dali turned to the destructive post war world, which the artist looked at with concern and which pushed him to a mystical approach to work.
This was one of the sides of Dali's personality, which was manifested even in the "Temptation of St. Anthony".
After the end of the war in 1945,Dali decided to stay in the United States, where he was preparing for his artistic revival.
Now he was more than ever sure that the artists of the Renaissance period were right when they painted on religious themes, and in the way they did it.
He declared war on the academic style of writing preferred by traditional salons, on African art, which had a profound influence on such important figures in European art as Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse, and on the decorative plagiarism of artists who became abstract artists because they really had nothing to say.
Dali said that he was going to revive Spanish mysticism and show the unity of the Universe by depicting the spirituality of matter.
One of the first paintings that carried his new vision of the world was "Dematerialization near the nose of Nero" (1947).
It depicts a dissected cube under an arch, in the bend of which a bust of Nero floats.
The dissection symbolizes the splitting of the atom.
Dali began to constantly use this technique.
Shortly after returning to Spain, Dali began working on two orders.
For Peter Brooke, the English theater director who directed Strauss's "Salome", and for Luchino Visconti, the Italian film director who is making a new version of Shakespeare's "As You Like It".
He also worked on sketches for the "Madonna Port Ligat", where Gala was depicted as a Madonna.
However, first of all, he completed his other important work with the image of Gala: "Leda Atomika" (1949), sketches for which he began to make since 1947.
In addition, there was an unfinished version of this picture, which was started in 1948.
In" Leda Atomika", a naked Gala hovers on a pedestal.
Behind her, the wings of a swan are spread out.
Weightless objects hover under and around the pedestal.
In the background, the cliffs of Kadakes are visible.
The myth of Leda was very important for Dali, since he identified his relationship with Gala with the marriage of Zeus and Leda, from which the swan gave birth to two eggs, and from them two pairs of twins were born: Elena and Polydeucus and Castor and Clytemnestra.
Dali saw in himself and Gala two twins who have one life and memory for two and are not able to exist without each other.
In the painting "Madonna" there is a similar composition: the Gala is dressed like a traditional Madonna of the Renaissance.
The subtlety of Dali's dual image technique is clearly visible in this fragment, where the dying bull is part of the matador's cloak, the bull's eye is a corpse fly, repeated to create the illusion of sequins on the matador's costume.
Flies, spangles and dots resemble flying particles, which is consistent with Dali's ideas about physics and the nature of matter.
The central part of her dress is open yta.
In the resulting opening, the Christ child is visible, hovering over a blue cloud or pillow.
The Madonna is sitting in a split arch.
An egg hovers over her head, and above it is a casement shell, symbolizing St. James, who arrived on the shores of Spain on a shell, as Aphrodite arrived on the shores of Cyprus.
Other objects floating around the Madonna include shells and fish.
The coast of Cadaques appears again in the background.
The picture is painted in a frank style, without the effects of a paranoid critical method, a dual image and the illusion of reality, which confirms Dali's stated intention to work within the classical framework, which for him was the highest point of artistic development and from which any new art should begin.
Dali has moved far away from his radical social and political views of the 1930s.
This was also emphasized by the fact of his audience with Pope Pius XII in November 1949, during which he asked for the blessing of the first version of the"Madonna of Port Ligat".
One can only guess that the pope did not know that the Gala who posed for the Madonna was a woman who was promiscuous in her relationships, and Dali considered her divine.
Dali painted a later version of " Madonna Port Ligata "in 1950, using the same composition as in the first picture, but adding more important details for himself and for Gala, including rhinos that appeared in his" Lace Maker " and a series with rhinos.
At the same time, Dali worked on several other projects, including the scenery and costumes for the production of Manuel de Fall's ballet "El sombrero de tres picos" ("The Triangular Hat").
Dali placed sacks of flour and trees floating in space on the stage, while the miller's house itself flies apart with slanting doors and windows, one of which flies into the sky.
Dali also painted many portraits, including a portrait of the art collector James Dana, made in 1949.
In the 1950s, Dali painted a number of beautiful portraits of theater artists, including Katerina Cornel (1951) and Laurence Oliver as Richard 111(1951).
Portraits, as a source of great income, were in the first place with Dali until the 1970s.
The portrait of Francisco Franco's daughter Carmen Bordiu Franco was presented to the Spanish leader in 1974 at a special ceremony.
Dali's most significant painting of 1951 was "The Crucifixion of Christ from St. John" with a crucifix hanging in the sky over the Port of Ligat.
This immaculate and unobtrusive painting without any surreal overtones, was sold to the Glasgow Art Gallery.
However, immediately after she was hanged, she was cut by a vandal protesting against the amount of 8,200 pounds paid for the painting by the gallery.
(For five years, the gallery has returned this money from interest, the sale of entrance tickets and the rights to produce reproductions.)
Another painting with the same simplified visual approach is called "Eucharistic Still Life".
It depicts a table covered with a tablecloth with bread and fish lying on it.
Both of these paintings breathe an unusual simplicity for Dali.
Perhaps they reflected Dali's joy and gratitude about his return to his native land in the Port of Ligat.
Now Dali's main concern was the development of his views on mysticism and science.
He made several drawings of a decaying Raphael's head, which looked like the Pantheon in Rome.
His constant research of a new direction - disintegrating or explosive paintings - culminated in "Galatea of Spheres" (1952), where the head of Gala consists of rotating spheres.
He also portrayed himself naked and on his knees before disintegrating head gala, and called it "Naked Gave speculating before the five regular bodies, turning into particles of which suddenly appears Leonardo's Leda, chromosomically face gala" (1954).
His concern with the new ideas of the theory of relativity led him to return to the "Persistence of memory" 1931.
Now, in The Disintegration of the Permanence of Memory (1952-54), Dali depicted his soft clock below sea level, where stones like bricks stretch into perspective.
The memory itself was decaying, since time no longer existed in the meaning that Dali attached to it.
Dali, who painted on religious and scientific topics, needed rest.
The artist also rested, creating erotic works and works with black humor.
Together with his friend photographer Philip Halsman, Dali published a book in 1954 called: "Dali's Mustache: a photo interview".
"Am I crazy?
Yes, I am much more normal than anyone who bought this book" - was a typical phrase of the artist at the presentation of this book, where his famous surprisingly waxed mustache, called by himself "antennas for the perception of art", was praised.
In the same year, he also wrote "A Young Virgin, Self sodomized by her Own Chastity".
The painting depicted a naked woman being threatened by several rhinoceros horns.
The rhino horn became a new symbol for Dali.
The artist associated it with the" Lace Maker " by Jan Vermeer in several of his works in 1955.
This idea was also used in the film "The Brilliant Story of Denteliers and Rhinos") shot by Robert Desharnais, where Dali reproduced a picture of Vermeer in a cage with rhinos at the Vincennes Zoo in Paris.
This incongruous juxtaposition of a lace maker and rhinos meant Dali's return to his paranoid - critical world.
He made a fortune from this by attending his lecture on the "phenomenological aspect of the paranoid critical method", which he was supposed to give at the Sorbonne, in a limousine (Dali called the penis" limousine") covered with cauliflower.
But Dali did not give up his desire for religion, which was bursting out.
It appeared again in 1955 in the "Last Supper", where kneeling figures wrapped in cloaks stand around a table in a room overlooking the bay of Port Ligat, from the waters of which an almost transparent Christ grows.
The religious theme is also strong in the "Ecumenical Council" (1960), where Dali also placed his image.
In the center, Gala holds a cross.
Behind her is some kind of misty scene with figures above which a white dove hovers, personifying the Holy Spirit.
Numerous works of the artist of that period are distinguished by a variety of styles and approaches, as if he had not yet found a new path in art, which mysticism and science pointed out to him.
The perfection of his technique remained unchanged, as, for example, in "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus" (1958).
This masterpiece depicts the Gala and the ship of Columbus in a complex blue - gray composition.
Or in "The Holy Virgin of Guadalupe" (1959) with her pyramidal composition: two priests kneel on clouds, from which a delightful cassock grows, crowned with the Holy Virgin and a Child.
Dali was also looking for new approaches in the technique of writing and even experimented with a specially made gun, shooting nails and pieces of metal from it according to drawings.
Drawing History and Trains Realizing new ideas with his usual inexhaustible energy, Dali created several more ballets, among them " Grape Pickers "and" Ballet for Gala", for which he developed the libretto and scenery, and Maurice Bejard - choreography.
121) The premiere took place in 1961 at the Venice Phoenix Theater.
He continued to surprise the audience with his extravagant appearances.
122) For example, in Rome, he appeared in a "Metaphysical Cube" (a simple white box covered with scientific icons).
Most of the spectators who came to see Dali's performances were simply attracted by an eccentric celebrity.
However, his real fans did not like these antics.
They believed that the showman casts a shadow on the artist's work.
125) To this Dali replied that he was not a clown, but a terribly cynical society, in its naivety, did not suspect that he was playing a serious play to hide his madness.
Criticizing modern art for leading the public to a dead end, Dali spoke favorably about such once beloved, and now unpopular French artists of the historical genre as Jean Louis Ernest Mesonnier and Mariano Fortuny, who painted great and noble epic scenes for buildings where power structures were located.
These artists, whom fans of modern art called "pompiers" ("firefighters"), according to Dali, wrote in a good realistic manner.
He demonstrated his ability to write in the same spirit in the big picture "The Battle of Tetuan" (1962), which was placed next to the work of Fortuny at the Palacio del Tinel in Barcelona.
In this painting, Dali felt a strong influence of the style of Eugene Delacroix with his numerous battle scenes.
In addition, the artist worked out the details well, made the plot active and effective and, of course, put the Gala in the background.
After one of his regular visits to the United States, where his fame had already spread around the continent, thanks to which the sale of paintings went more successfully, Dali returned to Europe in 1962 with another scientific development for creating paintings.
The device was called an "electrocular monocle" and allowed transmitting an image using a television signal to a telescopic tube and seeing both the object and its surroundings.
This device, Dali explained, was a response to his method of dual image and paranoid - critical method, since it was intended to help expand vision, while others used drugs for this.
It is not clear what caused this, but Dali's paranoid critical method was again forcefully manifested in "The Railway Station in Perpignan" (1965).
Perpignan is the first railway station in France immediately after crossing the border of Spain, so it has a special symbolic meaning for the artist as a point of entry and exit to the rest of the world.
But it was here that he once remarked that "when Gala arranges for the delivery of paintings by train after us, the most unusual ideas come to my mind."
In Dali's image of this important place, the railway station is an indeterminate place.
The train hangs over the void, into which the weightless figure of Dali himself falls or floats freely in it with his arms outstretched in front of the ghostly figure of a man.
On each side are a man and a woman from Millet's Angel.
Behind them is another couple, united by a sexual theme.
The revival of the Representative Art "Railway Station", the meaning of which was very important for Dali, since it combined the symbolism of the "Angel" of living together with Gala and his deep attachment to his native places in Catalonia, became the catalyst for his creativity, the fruit of which was the ambitious "Tuna Fishing" (1966-67), the second title of the work "Tribute to the Due Mesonnier".
The subject of "Tuna fishing" is simple fishermen catching tuna.
However, Dali used the painting to create a new basis in the technique of writing, leaving his clear Renaissance style and mixing pointillism, favism and other techniques with a universal, almost anarchic freedom of brushstrokes.
The composition consists of groups of fishermen surrounding flocks of tuna and killing this fish with knives, swords, harpoons and other devices, which expresses the cruelty of hunting.
This moment in time, the artist said, is the meeting place of the finite world.
Dali dedicated this painting to Mesonnier, because, he claimed, it was a revival of representative art.
After finishing this work, which took about two years to create, Dali began working on another picture: "The Hallucinogenic Bullfighter" (1968-70).
Here the technique of the dual image and the paranoid critical method were revived again, but in a new, more refined manner.
Many traditional symbols for Dali were revived, such as the Venus of Milo, Gala, the rocks of Cadaquez and Dali's boy in a sailor suit (as he portrayed himself in "The Ghost of Sexual Attractiveness" in 1932).
The hidden figure behind the Venus de Milo is Mano Leth, the legendary Spanish bullfighter.
He is also Dali's dead brother the poet Lorca, and the ghost of friends who remained only in Dali's memory, causing him the fear of death and destruction.
At this time, Dali's creative energy pushed him to create many other works, including erotic drawings, a series of horses and drawings of Gala, which remained for him the center of the Universe, which was reflected in his painting "The view of Dali from behind, writing Gala...".
This became a kind of anthem of their life together, which lasted for more than forty years.
The painting is a flawlessly painted double portrait that fully meets Dali's requirements for the perfection of the Renaissance technique.
Dali Theater Museum Since about 1970, Dali's health began to deteriorate.
Although his creative energy did not decrease, thoughts of death and immortality began to bother him.
He believed in the possibility of immortality, including the immortality of the body, and explored ways to preserve the body through freezing and DNA transplantation in order to be born again.
However, more important was the preservation of the works, which became his main project.
He put all his energy into it.
The artist came up with the idea to build a museum for his works.
Soon he took up the reconstruction of the theater in Figueres, his homeland, which was badly destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.
A giant geodesic dome was erected over the stage.
The auditorium was cleared and divided into sectors in which his works of various genres could be presented, including the bedroom of Mae West and large paintings such as "The Hallucinogenic Bullfighter".
Dali painted the entrance foyer himself, depicting himself and Gala washing gold in Figueres, with their legs hanging from the ceiling.
The salon was named the Palace of the Winds, after the poem of the same name, which tells the legend of the east wind, whose love married and lives in the west, so whenever he approaches her, he is forced to turn, while his tears fall to the ground.
This legend was very much liked by Dali, a great mystic who dedicated another part of his museum to eroticism.
As he often liked to emphasize, eroticism differs from pornography in that the first brings happiness to everyone, and the second brings only failures.
Many other works and other trinkets were exhibited in the Dali Theater Museum.
The salon opened in September 1974 and looked not so much like a museum as a bazaar.
There, among other things, were the results of Dali's experiments with holography, from which he hoped to create global three dimensional images.
(His holograms were first exhibited at the Knedler Gallery in New York in 1972.
He stopped experimenting in 1975.)
In addition, the Dali Theater - Museum exhibits double spectroscopic paintings depicting a naked Gala against the background of a painting by Claude Lorain and other art objects created by Dali.
The demand for Dali's works has become crazy.
Book publishers, magazines, fashion houses and theater directors fought for it.
He has already created illustrations for many masterpieces of world literature, such as the Bible, Dante's "Divine Comedy", Milton's "Paradise Lost", Freud's "God and Monotheism", Ovid's "The Art of Love".
He also created surreal compositions, such as" Napoleon's Death Mask on a rhinoceros"," Hallucinogenic bullfighter "with drums, scissors, spoons, soft clocks, crowned with a crown, or"Vision de l'Ange with the thumb of God and the twelve apostles".
The cult of Dali, the abundance of his works in different genres and styles led to the appearance of numerous fakes, which caused great problems on the world art market.(126)
Dali himself was involved in a scandal in 1960, when he signed many blank sheets of paper intended for creating prints from lithographic stones stored at dealers in Paris.
An accusation was made of the illegal use of these blank sheets.
However, Dali remained unperturbed and in the 1970s continued to lead his erratic and active life, as always continuing to search for new plastic ways to explore his amazing world of art. (129)
The End of a Dream Salvador Dali had two dreams: one was born from the ideas swarming in his head, the other was the result of youthful dreams to live a full life with the necessary amenities.
The first, completely his own, sometimes opened slightly and allowed the outside world, which never fully understood the riddle of the artist's mind, to catch its reflection.
The second was cherished by Gala and friends who helped him gain recognition and achieve world fame.
Dali constantly expressed recognition of the important role of Gala in his life in his works.
Her influence, as a muse and model, was very important for most of his paintings.
In the late 1960s, Dali's gratitude took a more tangible form: he bought a castle for her in Pubol, near Figueres, decorating it with his paintings and providing all the amenities and making it luxurious.
It remains unclear whether Gala wanted to have a castle.
Many believed that she would like to live in Tuscany.
It is also unclear whether the gift to the wife of the castle meant the beginning of a separate life.
The life and business partnership of Gala Dali were so inseparable that it was impossible to imagine their complete break.
All her life with Dali, Gala played the role of the gray cardinal, preferring to remain in the background.
Some considered her the driving force of Dali, others a witch who weaves intrigues.
When English TV journalist Russell Harty interviewed Dali for a BBC TV program in 1973, Gala reluctantly agreed to appear in the doorway for a few seconds.
But when Harty's film crew was about to follow Dali into the pool, she disappeared altogether.
Perhaps now she is tired of the antics and tricks designed for the public.
Gala and Dali have always managed their affairs and his ever growing wealth with efficient efficiency.
It was she who insisted on taking money for his performances in front of the public, and closely followed private transactions for the purchase of his paintings.
She was physically and mentally necessary, so when she died in June 1982, he suffered a heavy loss.
Driven by a strong desire to be close to her spirit, Dali moved to Pubol Castle, almost ceasing to appear in society.
Despite this, his reputation grew.
In 1982, the Salvador Dali Museum, opened in Cleveland, Ohio, and contained most of his works collected by E. and A. Reynolds Morse, moved to an impressive building in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The Georges Pompidou Center in Paris staged a large retrospective of Dali's works in 1979, which was later sent across the English Channel to the Tate Gallery in London.
The double screening of the retrospective allowed a wide segment of the European population to get acquainted with Dali's works and brought him great popularity.
Among the awards showered on Dali as if from a cornucopia was membership in the Academy of Fine Arts of France.
Spain honored him with the highest honor, awarding him the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, presented to him by King Juan Carlos.
Dali was declared the Marquis of Dae Pubol in 1982.
Despite all this, Dali was unhappy and felt bad.
He threw himself into his work.
All his life he admired the Italian artists of the Renaissance, so he began to paint paintings inspired by the heads of Giuliano de ' Medici, Moses and Adam (located in the Sistine Chapel) by Michelangelo and his "Removal from the Cross" in the Church of St. Peter in Rome.
He also began to draw in a free style.
The linear, expressionist style of writing, reminiscent of the manner of Vincent van Gogh, was manifested in his painting "The Bed and the Bedside Table violently attack the cello" (1983), where the clear classical lines of Dali's early works give way to a freer, more romantic style.
And in 1984, Dali almost lost his life.
He had been bedridden for several days when the bed somehow caught fire.
Perhaps the cause was a faulty lamp at the bed.
The whole room was ablaze.
He managed to crawl to the door.
Robert Desharnais, Dali's business manager for many years, saved him from death by pulling him out of a burning room.
Dali suffered severe burns, and since then little has been heard about him, although in 1984 Desharnais published a monograph "Salvador Dali: a man and his work".
Soon the inevitable rumors began to spread that Dali was completely paralyzed, that he had Parkinson's disease, that he was being forcibly locked up.
And even about the fact that for several years he was physically unable to do those works that continued to appear under his name.
The real Dali Salvador Dali, Marquis of Pubol, died on January 23, 1989, six years after completing his last work "Dovetail", a simple calligraphic composition on a white sheet.
The simplicity of the painting is reminiscent of the work of Paul Klee and is touching, like the music of a violin.
Was it the real Dali?
Was there a simple village philosopher with instinctive wisdom hiding under his mustache, which a journalist from a French magazine once asked to shave off in order to see the real Dali?
Many people think so and regret the appearance of a sexy tuxedo, lobsters symbolizing puberty, sodomized pianos and the "Kara n mehra" ("Shit and eat") system, with which he constantly attracted attention to himself.
While working on his last painting, Dali once admitted to a rare guest that he was going to write a series of paintings based not on pure imagination, mood or dreams, but on the reality of his illness, existence and important memories.
At the same time, it is sometimes impossible not to think that Dali imagined his life as some kind of catastrophe.
Blessed with titanic energy and a lively creative mind, he was simultaneously cursed by the natural talent of the ringleader and the joker, which cast a shadow on his reputation as an artist.
131) Like most artists, including such modern masters as Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet, Dali most likely felt that he did not express everything he saw that burned his soul.
But his indisputable skill, which he developed, and the power of his most expressive images touched the strings of the soul of many people belonging to the most diverse cultural strata.
His memorable images are among the symbols of the spiritual pantheon of art and are likely to remain persistent milestones of twentieth century art.
Salvador Dali, with the strangeness peculiar to him during his lifetime, lies unburied, as he bequeathed, in a crypt in his Theater, the Dali Museum in Figueres.
132) He left his fortune and his works to Spain.
http://www.staratel.com/pictures/dali/biogr.htm
About Salvador Dali
Introduction
Understanding the place
Salvador Dali
in the history of modern
art is similar to the perception of his paintings
-
tangible and clear images
they are simultaneously complete
uncertainties and
ambiguities.
(33)
Judging by what is known about his early youth,
he was motivated by a desire to be different from his contemporaries, and at the same time
time for him to want to be recognized by them as the dominant personality
with their always correct views.
(3
4)
Psychological explanation
-
by yourself
Given
I really liked it
-
it could be that he was clearly aware of his own
the inferiority that he needed as
-
then compensate.
(35)
But if this was the case, where did these
feelings and how
have they developed?
(36)
His life in a small Catalan town
Figueres in northern Spain seemed to be happy and typical for
a native of a provincial family of average income.
Beginning
Salvador Philippe Yahinto Dali and Dominic
born on May 2, 1904
years.
His father was a notary public in Figueres.
He knew
his place in society and, like many Catalans, was anti Madrid
a Republican and an atheist, too.
Mother
Salvador Dali
also
she was a typical representative of her class
sa.
She was a loving wife
and a staunch Catholic, who, without any doubt, insisted
on the fact that her family regularly attends church.
Both parents
they loved Salvador and his younger sister Anna
-
Maria and provided them with
the best for that time about
the knowledge that was available to them.
Soon at
Given
there is a strong opinion that parents
they did not love him at all, but their older brother, who died in 1903, a year before his
births.
This revelation appeared in the Unspoken
revelations
Salvador Dali
,
a book published in 1976,
after the publication of his three previous autobiographies.
Was it
the expulsion of the consequences of trauma or the fruit of a vivid imagination
an artist who has spent his entire life creating hidden and ambiguous
http://www.staratel.com/pictures/dali/biogr.htm
About Salvador Dali Introduction
Understanding the place of Salvador Dali in the history of modern art is similar to the perception of his paintings - tangible and clear images are at the same time full of uncertainty and ambiguity.(33)
Judging by what is known about his early youth, he was motivated by a desire to differ from his contemporaries, and at the same time he wanted to be recognized by them as a dominant personality with his always correct views.(34)
The psychological explanation Dali himself liked it very much could be that he was clearly aware of his own inferiority, which he needed to somehow compensate for.(35)
But if this was the case, where did these feelings come from and how did they develop? (36)
His life in the small Catalan town of Figueres in northern Spain seemed to be happy and typical for a native of a middle class provincial family.
The beginning of Salvador Philippe Yahinto Dali and Dominic was born on May 2, 1904.
His father was a notary public in Figueres.
He knew his place in society and, like many Catalans, was an anti Madrid Republican and also an atheist.
Salvador Dali's mother was also a typical representative of her class.
She was a loving wife and a staunch Catholic who, no doubt, insisted that her family attend church regularly.
Both parents loved Salvador and his younger sister Anna Maria and provided them with the best education available to them for that time.
Soon Dali had a firm opinion that his parents did not love him at all, but his older brother, who died in 1903, a year before his birth.
This revelation appeared in the Unspoken Revelations of Salvador Dali, a book published in 1976, after the publication of his three previous autobiographies.
Was it an exorcism of the consequences of the trauma or a figment of the artist's vivid imagination, who had been creating hidden and ambiguous images all his life
