Salvador Dalí

'But as in life, so also in dreams, method is everything' - Salvador Dalí

About Salvador Dalí's Art

'But as in life, so also in dreams, method is everything...' Dalí created paintings with a fetishist character. He brought to light some aspects of the human condition, contradictions and, not least of all, a bit of the history of humanity. This history was staged on paper and canvas, and became reality in the arms of hallucination. His wife Gala, Gradiva, the Forwards-Striding, as he called her, was a realist and muse to him, a healer and his shadow at the same time. The main role in the play was carried out by Dalí himself, though, and everything had already begun in his childhood in Figueres. Dalí's autobiography begins with the sentence: 'At the age of six, I wanted to be a cook, at seven, I wanted to be Napoleon, and my ambition has grown ever since.' Dalí's life provided for a great deal of gossip and scandals, and this amused him. In his paintings he also sought to proclaim ambiguity. Numerous biographies and documentation verify the phenomenon of his popularity. He was an excellent draftsman and painter, observer and imaginer. Dalí wrote his autobiography in the middle of his life, before he was even forty. 'The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí', published in New York in 1942, is a book truly worth reading. It attests to the fact that he knew about the treasure which he was to keep, and he didn't want to give up any of it.

Dalí became an open book himself. His main work came early, from 1925-1941. At this time, Dalí created his stupendous painterly vocabulary of Surreal art, masterpieces of the 20th century. At the same time, there were parallels to the great artists of the Renaissance and of Mannerism. We can even trace some aspects all the way back to Bosch. Dalí wanted dream images, the imagination of the subconscious to be closely linked to reality, and this was accomplished through his hyperrealist style. He wanted to place the unreal on the same level as reality. It was no fight of chimeras, quite to the contrary, he knew how to direct the parade of chimeras with grandiosity. He knew how to hide or disclose the reality or non-reality through extremes and distortion, to the point where one no longer knew which was which.

Dalí fed on his earlier insights and creations for the rest of his life. His eccentricity became a cult which he consciously staged from childhood on. He was a genius at play. 'I have never understood the speed with which I became popular.' It is possible that his fount of creativity, insofar as pictorial innovation, dried up relatively early. He was able, though, to use and transform his earlier pictorial creations masterfully and inexhaustibly. This is most obvious in his graphic work. To own a graphic by Dalí is to enter into his work.

Dalí was a genius of combination theory. Was he secretly aware that, when he wrote his autobiography and Europe was in flames, he had already created his best work? From then on, he began a sort of pictorial archives management, so to speak. Dalí now used what he had already created. Something new occurred, though: Dalí became a masterful illustrator. His graphic work above all benefited from this. And it made Dalí - apart from his spectacular appearances - famous throughout the world.

If you desire to delve into the evolution of Dalí's work, there is an infinity of publications available, in addition to the catalogues raisonnés. And significantly enough, everything led to self-portraits: the appearance of a grasshopper, crutches, a small boy or the beloved Gala. Dalí's biography condensed into the paintings and the paintings flowed into his life. Sarcasm on life and death, love and obsessions became part of Dalí's style. Dalí was a revolutionary academic painter. His contact with the Surrealists in Paris had already confirmed Dalí on his unusual path. Buñuel's films also gave him great impetus. Dalí created fetishes, embodiments of an active imagination.

Cliffs, women's shoes, a woman's back, shadows, the mutilations and surroundings of erotic growths and nightmares, metamorphoses of Narcissus. An early drawing portrays Gala as a child on the unicorn of her fate. His acquaintance with Gala saved him from madness. Gala was open to change and had a firm grip on life. Firmer than his fantasy world. He painted the strange crutches in his paintings, he said, in order to support that which cannot stand alone, his hallucinatory raptures. The unreal needed a support in order to keep alive, and so the crutches become an evocative magician's wand of creation, and everything is raised to the scepter of his kingdom. Dalí knew how to fill his fear of emptiness with images, with the 'spangled junk of my madness', as he said of himself. Dalí couldn't have been Spanish if Don Quijote hadn't appeared early on in his paintings. Dalí was also Spanish enough to have a premonition of the Spanish civil war, and to this premonition he gave form.

Dalí was able to capture the magnificently rough coastal landscape with its fabulous stone formations near Figueres, Cadaqués and Port Lligat, and from it to make his deserts and timelessness. The endless horizon inspired him. There is hardly one painting in which at least one of these elements of the landscape did not appear, or in which an element of this landscape was not transformed into something surreal. The human being remained the centerpiece, whether in 'Rain Taxi with Mannequin and Burgundy Snail', 'Rose Mask', or 'Lobster Telephone'. By 1940, Dalí's eccentric period was over. He had become the forerunner of action art through his actions - he was an actor of the Surreal during his entire life.

Dalí was able to confront the extreme, to include the physical in his paintings, and to dissolve everything in the morphology of his understanding of form. The sting of emotion was deep in his flesh. The woman is as much an object as a stronghold of adoration. Here and there, the hermaphrodite triumphs, in some a masochist element. All in all, his works are a flirtation with desire, the desire, filled with self-irony, to satisfy himself and his public. ek