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Salvador Dali
The famous Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is most often called "mysterious", "enigmatic", "mystical", "fantastic", "mysterious", etc.
In the huge literature about him, numbering over a thousand articles and more than a hundred books, the life and work of the master appear as a "challenge", as an outrage of generally accepted social and aesthetic norms.
"Riddle", "scandal" - these are two words that are full of works dedicated to S. Dali.
The external extravagance of Dali's behavior in life is usually contrasted with the deep mystery of his creations.
It seems that the artist created his biography and works of art according to the same philosophical and aesthetic norms.
He, like a doctor investigating a disease, "inoculated" himself with the disease of the XX century and explicated its symptoms both at the level of being and at the level of an artistic image.
Salvador Dali's favorite thinkers were Plato, Spinoza, Montaigne, Voltaire, Kant, and among his contemporaries Ed. Husserl and M. Unamuno.
The artist has absorbed the vast spiritual culture of the West, he owns serious works on mythology, philosophy and art.
Dali is distinguished by an extraordinary clarity of judgment and clarity of mind.
The artist's life and his works, played out to the public, appear as a vivid embodiment of the " mysticism of consumer consciousness "(according to the definition of the sociologist Yu.Davidov) with his cult of money and eroticism, cruelty and irrationality.
The significance of Salvador Dali lies primarily in the fact that he showed with amazing force the various chimeras that prevail in the modern culture of the West.
And only a few of his works (less than 10) out of 1200 created are dedicated to images that express the deep spiritual supports of a person, and only they, according to the artist, can save "this crazy, crazy, crazy world".
"The dream of the mind gives birth to monsters," said the great Goya, a favorite artist of S. Dali.
The art of surrealism, the initiator of which in the early 1920s was, along with A. Breton, L. Aragon and others, S. Dali, who then became the largest representative of this trend (he said, not without reason: "Surrealism is me"), asserted the primacy of dreams and the unconscious over reason and cognition.
The monstrous chaos of images, the flow of monsters, the paradoxical shifts of meanings that fill Dali's works embody the "dream of reason", express the "madness" of this world.
The unconscious K.Jung, the subconscious Z.Freud found visible flesh in his paintings.
Art with.
Dali is a vivid evidence that the world is sick, sick with cruelty and perverted sensuality, only war and eroticism excite people.
At the same time, the artist outrages the complacency of common sense, the tastelessness of mass culture, the omnivorous gourmandism of rich people.
Dali took" dandyism", shocking" cretinism", from the Dadaists, the artist developed the themes of "cannibalism" largely under the influence of F.'s creativity.
Picabia.
The English satirist, the author of the famous dystopia "1984" J. Orwell, in a special essay dedicated to the artist, argues that two concepts can lead Dali into a real frenzy - these are conversations about "decency" and "sanity".
However, to recreate such an image of the world, where everything is separated by decomposition, a huge force of sober reason is needed to somehow organize this meaningless, absurd flow of being.
Dali wrote: "We contrast the passive, disinterested, contemplative and aesthetic attitude to irrational phenomena with an active, organizing, systemic and cognitive attitude to these phenomena."
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not a madman," Dali will say.
He will call his creative method" paranoidally critical", emphasizing by this definition that the painful consciousness is checked by a sober critical mind.
Very many critics note in the art of S.They gave a rigid, rational beginning as something negative, but the majority almost does not notice it, chained by the general irrationality, the apparent "randomness" of the images created by him.
"Dali asserts the advantage of the uncontrolled play of subconscious associations, although each of his works, as well as every public action, is carefully planned and executed," E. Gordon3 notes.
Dali strives to create a "photograph" of the unconscious ("painting," he claims , is a manual photograph of a concrete irrationality and an imaginary world of things"), to reliably capture his dreams, since it is this spontaneous life of the human self, uncontrolled from the outside, that the surrealist artist sees as a genuine reality.
His painting vividly expresses the idea of A. Breton about "doubting the reality of the real".
The paradoxical combination of the unreal and the naturalistic is one of the cardinal properties of Dali's art.
Another feature naturally follows from it: the hope for "chance", for unpredictability and "miracle", which can only really somehow connect the incongruous - authenticity and fiction,"poetry and truth".
The master creates generalized artistic images, builds complex, strictly thought out compositions of the "chaos" of painful visions.
His paintings are very expressive, beautiful in color, he is a great draughtsman: the lines in his works are refined and dynamic at the same time.
S. Dali is also a brilliant "designer" (by definition, F.Lorca) - in his canvases there is always a strict architectonics, an internal balance of parts.
It is very important when analyzing Dali's work not to stop, as it most often happens, unfortunately, at the level of the sign, at the consideration of the complex mythology and iconography of his works, but to penetrate into the originality of his figurative language.
The fact is that with all the richness of the" dictionary "of images of symbols, on which Salvador Dali" speaks " in his paintings and graphic sheets, with all the amazing ingenuity of the artist in this field - the main thing about him is that he is a brilliant master, the creator of magnificent easel paintings and exquisite easel and book graphics.
There are, perhaps, three main stages in Dali's work: the first (1904-1928) is a time of childhood impressions, studies, acquaintance with classical art, with the most important modern trends; the second (1928-1947) is a period of programmatic surrealist creativity; the third, last period (1948-1989) is a return to Spain, an appeal to the classical heritage, both artistic and philosophical religious, the creation of a series of religious canvases, intensive work in graphics.
The first period includes only a few works in which Dali's talent was fully manifested - this is primarily a painting"A basket of bread", written for Federico Garcia Lorca (1926).
The self portraits reveal the breadth of the young artist's search.
In one, he stylizes his appearance under old portraits ("Self Portrait with a Raphael neck", 1922-1923), in the other ("Cubic Self Portrait", 1926) demonstrates his creative abilities in modern stylistics.
The first surrealist canvases (1929-1931) are deliberately programmatic, in them Dali demonstrates the notorious " automatism "("The First Days of Spring"," The Great Masturbator").
In the 30s and 40s, the artist creates canvases that rightly brought him world fame.
These are the paintings of the true master of surrealism "The Foresight of the Spanish Civil War", "The Permanence of memory", "The Burning giraffe", "Spain", "A dream caused by the flight of a bee near a pomegranate a second before waking up".
In the 1950s and 1970s, Dali worked a lot in graphics - easel and book.
He creates a series of watercolors (102 sheets) on the themes of Dante, illustrates ancient myths and the Bible, he is attracted by the sophistication of copper engraving and the expressive possibilities of chiaroscuro in etching.
Each painting performs two functions pictorial and expressively decorative.
The fact is that when analyzing Dali's work, viewers see the main difficulty in understanding his pictorial essence, but it is important to remember that the main function of the pictorial language is to organize the decorative and rhythmic plane of the picture.
Surrealism and abstractionism as a language in which the world is "told" are, in principle, no more conventional and alienated from the surrounding reality than the most virtuously realistic reproduction of natural forms in a picture - all this is just the flatness of the canvas, a combination of colors and a variety of lines.
V. Kandinsky also drew attention to the fact that the viewer is equally calmly contemplating the snake and daisies that are depicted in the picture - this removes, in his opinion, all arguments about the authenticity, illusory nature of the pictorial image.
Dali seeks to reproduce in his works two purely human properties - the arrhythmia of our thoughts and the loss of brightness of perception due to habit.
He finds in things, people, and natural phenomena everything that is inaccessible with automatic possession and remains, as it were, eternally new, while at the same time being familiar for a long time.
The rhythm of the human body, especially in conditions of "disruptive situations", tends to return to the general rhythm of nature at any opportunity, looking for symmetry, repetition, stability.
The embodiment of the true natural rhythm in a picturesque image gives a feeling of getting rid of suffering and boredom, since the contemplation of a picturesque work eliminates automatism.
According to the aphoristic formula of Ya.
The image is a return to our feelings of novelty, the rhythm is an illusion that a solution has been found"4.
Dali acts in this field as a like minded Picasso, who said: "I want an equilibrium that arises on the fly... but not an equilibrium that is stable and inert."
His paintings, like his dreams, need interpretation.
Dali sometimes tries to recreate the spontaneity of the dream itself, sometimes as if retelling a dream in a picture, passes an irrational flow of images through auto censorship, emphasizing individual elements, giving the dream some consistency and structure; often his paintings are constructed as an interpretation, commenting on dreams as a set of images of symbols developed in traditional folk mythology, relatively speaking, writes according to Martin Zadek, according to which a person "sexualizes the universe".
Many of Dali's paintings depict insects - these are ants and grasshoppers, flies and bees.
As if Captain Lebyadkin, the hero of Dostoevsky's "Demons", or the poets of Oberiuta, Dali recreates a world like "a glass full of fly eating".
The artist conveys a sense of horror at the threat of turning a person into a kind of insect (as in the famous story by F.Kafka) with his vision of the world with "liquid glasses of eyes" (O. Mandelstam).
It is significant that D. Shostakovich wrote one of his last works on the poems of Captain Lebyadkin, expressing, like Dali, an environmental threat to spiritual culture.
Back at the end of the last century, Vladimir Solovyov wrote stanzas that can serve as a commentary on the paintings of S. Dali: "But do not tease the hyena of suspicion, the mice of longing!
/ / Not that, look how the leopards of vengeance sharpen their fangs!
// And donot call the owl of prudence this night!
// Asses of patience and elephants thoughts run away with it.
// His fate had a crocodile you're here itself..."
On the character level, Given most often uses the symbols, designed by Carl Jung: water and stone as the personification of the feminine and masculine; the egg is the image of the Universe, the beginning of the world; the world tree - structural basis of the universe; birds - the images of the afterlife life, etc. the Number of characters in mythology Gave a bound, and at the beloved of Bosch, with the transfer of verbal expression to an image.
Dali is primarily a master of metamorphosis.
This interest in transformation, the transformation of one into another, makes the artist related to antiquity.
Relatively speaking, the transformations of Thetis, Daphne or Narcissus are realized by him as the main paradigms of the existence of matter.
The artist captures the formation, not the given, hence there are so many double images in his works.
Dali created many visual oxymorons - this poetic figure acquired special significance in literature and art at the end of the last century.
How organically oxymorons have entered Dali's poetics is especially clearly seen in the illustrations he created for "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice through the Looking Glass" by L. Carol La, where "baobabs" live, etc.
With all the integrity of the artistic reality recreated by Dali, it appears in various works of the artist from one angle or another - as sleepy indifference and "spider deafness" (O. Mandelstam) in the painting "Telephone on the Shoal" (1938), as a geologically slow transformation of matter ("Transformations. Narcissus", 1937) and a dynamic, fast "game" of forms ("Illustrated Pleasures", 1929).
For all the significance of what Salvador Dali did in developing and deepening the" text " of modern culture, the main value is the creation of magnificent pictorial and graphic images.
Salvador Dali appears in his best works as a subtle, refined colorist, a brilliant draughtsman, a master of complex and at the same time architectonically clear composition.
It can, perhaps, be argued that those works in which Dali transforms the sign into an artistic image are genuine masterpieces of painting and graphics.
The huge tragic gift of Salvador Dali found its vivid reflection in his hardly not the most famous picture "The Foresight of the Spanish Civil War", or "Soft construction with boiled beans".
Against the background of a huge stormy sky, in all its height and breadth, a monstrous, eerily concatenation of human body parts appears - hands clutching a stump of the humerus in the death agony, diagonally cutting the canvas.
And above it stands a head on a tense neck with inflated veins.
This whole "construction" is based on a small locker - it is often present in Dali's paintings as an illusion of stability of everyday life, reinforcing the feeling of instability of the entire structure.
The horizon is given low - only a narrow strip of land.
There are beans scattered on it, pieces of skin, bloody entrails.
The picture has a huge anti war pathos - it has the generality of the poster and at the same time the texture, contrasting color ratios, and complex linear composition are very expressive.
Dali attached great importance to the drawing - its line can be dynamic and sharp, smooth and gentle, it can convey the most complex structure of the object and the light aura that envelops the object in the air.
Dali is a great colorist, not only, and perhaps not so much, the multi valued symbolism of color gives a special expressive expressiveness to his canvases, and the picturesque element of color itself, the harmonious balance of color spots or their dissonant opposition create a unique coloristic composition in the best Dali canvases.
The fabric of mental life, according to Henri Bergson (1859-1941), is duration (duree), the continuous variability of states that imperceptibly pass one into another.
Duration, and therefore life, has not a spatial, but a temporary character.
This "qualitative", "living" time is radically different from mechanically physical time.
The intellect is interpreted by the philosopher as an instrument of operating with "dead things", that is, phenomena, in contrast to intuition, which, as it were, directly penetrates into the subject, removing the opposition of the known to the knower.
Dali explores not so much the life of a person as a chain of events, but mainly the complex moves of human thought and feeling.
For example, the famous canvas " The Constancy of Memory "is a pictorial embodiment of Bergson's"duration".
In this sense, Dali's paintings can be considered as epistomological metaphors.
There is a kind of duality in the images and symbols created by Dali: then the ideal structure - a triangle or a polyhedron is seen as an absolute model of the universe, then the artist destroys the rigidity of structures with all his might, overcomes them with "softness".
In the film "The Permanence of Memory", time is destroyed with the help of the famous "soft" clock.
He called this image technique "physical anamorphosis" (distortion).
The paradigm of the game was chosen by Dali as the central constructive element.
The artist truly appears both in life and in creativity as a "man playing" (Homo. ludens according to J. Huizinga).
The game also appears in Dali as a kind of analogue of the" game " of natural forces, and at the same time it attracts the artist with its constructiveness ("artificiality").
He creates artistic images as game constructions of two types: a game as a competition for something (most often in compositions of an aggressive erotic nature) and as a representation of something, for example, "The Dream of Christopher Columbus (The Discovery of America)".
The artist created a certain "code" that should lead to the "secrets" of his work, his personality, Dali's paintings and graphic works are largely constructed as texts: the history of world culture appears as a series of metaphors that the artist includes in his works.
And this kind of "quotability" also makes him related to the masters of the past.
So, in the painting "Spain" the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are "read", in portraits and still lifes there is a clear connection with the art of the Italian painter of the XVI century Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Dali tried to combine two trends - a natural scientist's approach to the world, the "learning" of images (like Leonardo da Vinci's botanical studies), and the pathos of irrationalism and spontaneity.
Dali has an excellent command of the art of beating the format of the picture as one of the most important components of easel painting.
The elongated horizontal canvases are full of inventiveness, contain a consistent display of metamorphoses ("Transformations.
On the contrary, the vertically elongated format immediately suspends the dynamics and gives the composition a solemnity ("The Christ of San Juan de la Cruz").
"The horizon is the tuning fork of the composition," the artist says.
The low horizon gives the image some theatrical features (for example, "The Foresight of the Spanish Civil War").
In compositions with a high horizon, there are features close to the folklore beginning, the image acquires an ornamental symbolic character ("Spain").
The artist loves a large format, wide picturesque surfaces, which he always writes out with the care of a medieval master.
His paintings are designed for a long, close examination - every detail is like a word in the text, if it is not understood, the meaning of the whole will be lost.
The awareness of creativity as a craft, the close connection of painting with the textual nature of art, as well as the largely "performing" nature of his work (Dali's works often contain "quotes" from paintings by Surbaran, El Greco, Velasquez, Vermeer, etc.) allow us to speak of him as a "medieval" master and thus about the connection of his work with religion.
The artist relies on traditions, but interprets these traditions on the basis of his own method, which, in his opinion, allows us to identify a single connecting thread in works that seem to have nothing in common.
So, for example, "from the point of view of this method, such dissimilar, at first glance, paintings as "Gioconda", "Blagovest" by Millet and "Sailing to the Island of Kifera" by Watteau are written on the same topic and will have exactly the same meaning," Dali argued.
And at the same time, Dali, as you know, is perhaps the most vivid exponent of modernist trends in the culture of our century.
F. Lorca, who knew Dali well, created images in the word that are close to his painting, deeply understood the nature of Dali's art, the unique property of his personality.
He wrote: "I feel Dali's talent more and more deeply.
I think he is unique, and he has calmness and clarity of judgment in relation to what he considers really exciting.
He's wrong - so what?
He's alive.
His sharpest mind is combined with his discouraging childishness in such an unusual mixture, completely unique and charming.
What touches me more about him now is the frenzy of his constructivism (read - creation), when he intends to create from nothing, and so exerts his will, and rushes towards the squalls with such faith and with such force that it seems incredible.
There is nothing more dramatic than this physicality and this search for life for the sake of life itself...
He needs to hold the helm and carry faith in the celestial geometry.
He touches me: He evokes in me the same pure feeling (may our Lord God forgive me) as the baby Jesus abandoned in the courtyard of Bethlehem, under the straw of whose bed the sprout of the crucifixion is already hidden."
Dali is a deeply national artist, his art is based on the traditions of medieval portholes of the "Apocalypse" of the so called "Beatus type", that is, in a particularly harsh reading of the apocalyptic signs of the Spanish monk of the IX century Beatus.
The special density of the picturesque texture, clarity and a certain symbolism of colors , constructiveness and geometricism of images come from Surbaran, the "air" in the canvases, which Dali values so much, he learned to recreate from the great Velasquez.
Hermetic, conceptually encrypted treatises of Raymond Lulli (XIII century) - "The Great, Universal and Last Art", "The Book of the Ascent and Descent of the Intellect", "New Logic and the Art of Love", mentioned on the pages of S. Dali's writings, influenced his picturesque images of "celestial geometry", which appears as the embodiment of the hope that there are absolute, eternal values that resist the absurdity and chaos of being.
The artist's philosophical views, according to him, were largely predetermined by the concept of being and consciousness of the Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), especially his statement that in the face of existential "despair", a "hope" arises in a person for the restoration of the ontological unity of "creature" and "creator", that "sadness" and"sorrow" are evidence of dependence on the absolute, and "from his own deep nothingness, a person draws new strength in order to strive to be everything"9.
Like M.In many ways, Dali expresses an anarchic revolt against the commonness, the "absurdity" of human existence.
Dali contrasts this with the "irrationalist saving madness", the so called "quixotism", in which Don Quixote and Christ seem to merge.
Dali accepted the phenomenological appeal of Ed. Husserl's" Back to Things", realized objects as the most obvious carrier of human and ontological meaning, converging in this with the" metaphysical painting " of Giorgio de Chirico.
In his paintings, sculptures, works of applied art - in the so - called surrealist objects real objects turned into metaphysical objects, became objects of signs.
Thus, a work of art is a plastic philosophical metaphor, the main thing in the depicted (or created object) is the ability to have meanings.
In Dali's paintings, they get illogical, paradoxical connections, an absurd context, break out of the usual connections and become meaningless, that is, their meaning expands.
about infinity.
In the huge legacy of Dali, about ten paintings represent the "pillar and statement of truth" (the name of the famous work of P. Florensky) of the artist, which he expressed in the language of painting.
Among them, such canvases as "The Temptation of St. Nicholas" are of particular importance.
Antonia" (1946), "Madonna" (1950).
In the painting " The Temptation of St. Antonia "Dali shows the erotic preferences of the" Dear friend " of G. Maupassant (the picture was written for the preparation of the film of the same name).
The artist depicted a set of corresponding symbols (for example, an obelisk in the form of a phallus, a horse, elephants personifying sensuality, advancing on disgusting spider legs).
Three paintings: "The Christ of San Juan de la Cruz" (1951), "The Crucifixion" (1954) and "The Last Supper" (1955) contain such spiritual depth and are executed with such perfection that they can, perhaps, balance as a statement of the light principle in the world the whole mass of Dali's works recreating images of dark forces and evil.
"The Christ of San Juan de la Cruz" is one of the most famous works of the artist.
Dali connects it with the activities of Pope John XXIII10 (in the picture the crucifixion is a magnified image of the cross belonging to the pope many times), who went down in the history of the Vatican as a peacemaker and advocate for the unification of the churches, which was close to Dali's spiritual quest.
The artist made many preparatory drawings for this picture - he was looking for the most expressive ratio of light and dark, stable and ghostly.
A huge crucifix has ascended over the whole earth, beautiful and calm, it overshadows the earth, protects it.
The light triangle, in which the crucifix is inscribed, pierces the sleepy, calmed mist.
"Crucifixion", or" Octagonal hypercubes", reveals another facet in the artist's spiritual path - his faith in the life affirming, even, perhaps, we can say, saving power of the perfect form, the sacred number.
Strict geometric forms embody the number eight, which, according to Lulli, represents earthly harmony: Christ, who embodies Plotinus ' Unity, together with the eight forms the absolute, heavenly nine.
Near the crucifix placed in the interior of the Dali house, the artist's Gala wife is depicted, dressed in heavy "Surbaran" golden robes.
If in the first "Crucifixion" Christ appears in his divine, heavenly nature, then in the second - his human hypostasis is revealed.
The true peak of the artist's spiritual quest is his magnificent canvas "The Last Supper".
It embodies the philosophical, religious and aesthetic credo of Dali.
Here is "air", and light, and construction, and dream, and reality, and hope, and doubt.
In the center of a large horizontal canvas, Christ is depicted, but in three hypostases: like a Son who descended to Earth, he sits at the table with his disciples, but then we notice that he is not sitting at the table at all, but is immersed to the waist in water, that is, he is baptized with water, or the Holy Spirit, and thus embodies the second hypostasis of the Trinity, and a male torso rises ghostly above him as if part of the composition "Ascension" - return to God the Father.
The apostles are depicted with their hands folded in prayer and their heads bowed low to the table - they seem to be worshipping Christ or sleeping - in this case there is an allusion to the gospel text containing Christ's request not to sleep while he prays to God: "Take this cup past me."
This Dali painting is surprisingly harmonious and bright, the combinations of blue blue, yellow gold colors are close to the color structure of the Rublev "Trinity".
It is difficult to imagine that this is the same artist who simultaneously carries in his soul nightmarish images of hell.
The apostolic language of the" Last Supper " is also expressed by the fact that the entire composition is enclosed in a huge dodecahedron, the twelve faces of which (like the apostolic word of the twelve disciples of Christ) encompass the entire universe.
The extraordinary gift of Salvador Dali, his all encompassing versatility, which allows the master to embody micro and macro worlds in visible images, make him a recipient of the great traditions of the titans of the Renaissance.
The work of Salvador Dali appears as one of the universal symbols of the culture of our century.
Salvador Dali...
Exhibition of works
The Holocaust
Portrait
Decorative style
Landscape, still life
Mosaic
Genre paintings
The theme of love
Religion
Social art
Various genres
In memory of Perets Markish
Books
Sunset Smile
On the draft of the epochs
