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Salvador Dali Surreal ArtistThe Spanish Painter Popular Among High School and College StudentsUse the artwork of Spanish artist Salvador Dali to teach about Surrealism and the Surrealist movement of art history.
While his place in art history may still be uncertain in some circles, the reality is that high school and college kids are familiar with, and love Salvador Dali. His artwork and his personality make a good starting point for teaching and understanding Surrealism. Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989) is an artist whom most art schools seem to want to sweep under rug. Not only did he have a Picasso-sized ego but he also sided with the infamous Franco government of fascist Spain. Historically, this makes him unpopular, though many ignore the anti-Semitism of Edgar Degas that was brought to light by the Dreyfus Affair. Perhaps one of the most accessible things about Dali is that he is clearly quite a good draftsman, drawer, and painter. In his artwork, he has the ability to make his surreal and dreamlike imagery believable, because it is rendered so faithfully yet with believable exaggerations. It’s easy to see in one of his most famous works the painting, The Persistence of Memory from 1931. In this painting, realistic watches melt into surreal drips that, while drink on artistic license, still obey gravity. The realistic Catalonian cliffs in the background meet a solid mass of land and a serene body of water, all believable. Yet on the mainland rests a flattened, deformed profile of a face (presumably Dali’s) with another drippy, droopy pocket watch resting on the side of the face. For Dali, the ants represent death and decay. The title also gives us a clue perhaps as to the significance of the clocks, which are rendered meaningless and useless by their flaccidness. The painting is meant to create anxiety also with the partial portrait with the flamboyant eyelashes and no visible body. Somehow, because of the recognizable parts, our eye scans and rescans this part of the painting, searching to make sense of something that is not logical. Dali must have had some kind of knowledge that this was one of his greatest hits, since he followed it up in 1952-54 with another painting entitled, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. In this painting, we see the disparate parts of the original literally disintegrating into a structured grid pattern. The light and color of this painting as well as the grid pattern are what holds this work together compositionally. Strange but true facts about Dali: He was the designer of the logo for Chupa Chups, a Spanish candy company. His moustache was inspired by Diego Velazquez, a 17th-century, Spanish painter. Use Dali to then introduce other Surrealists including Rene Magritte, Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Andre Masson, and Joan Miro.
The copyright of the article Salvador Dali Surreal Artist in Art & Society is owned by Mary Rayme. Permission to republish Salvador Dali Surreal Artist in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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