Essay on Surrealism and Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was an artist who was almost more notorious for his colorful personality as for his artistic talents. He took an apolitical outlook on world politics, but often dabbled in anti-establishment movements. This essay explores the life of Salvador Dali, the historical and political time he lived in, and how these influenced his work.

In this painting Surreal training had served him well, as its influence was appearing in it. He gained a unique style by integrating Surrealism with everyday’s life. Dali painted this picture in 1940 in the United States. This work is a real example of Dali’s work at that time. In this painting Dali experimented the idea of double imagery, which is any change in the head position is taken as a switch between tow different things in the same painting. In this painting, we could find three examples of double imagery. The first is the switch between the Dutch slave traders and the bust of the French philosopher Voltaire. The faces, collars, and midriffs of the two

The next works we will examine are examples of how Picasso’s sexuality affected his work from the beginning of his career. At the very young age of 13, Picasso’s sexual persona began to be revealed with a drawing of two donkeys fornicating. When Picasso was 16, he visited several brothels in Paris and Barcelona and produced a number of drawings from these experiences. These works included nude women by themselves but also performing sexual acts with other participants. In 1903, he painted La Douleur, also known as Scene Erotique, a work depicting a young man receiving oral sex from a woman. It is believed that the man

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

Known for his abstract paintings, Salvador Dali was a very influential and well-known artist. Many may think his work is strange, but each painting of his was well thought out to convey a message. Dali included tons of symbolism and details from his past in his paintings. The more knowledge you have on Dali, the easier it is to decipher his paintings. Portrait of My Dead Brother is a painting by Dali that reflects an important event in his life.

The surrealist movement of the 1920s-1930s was largely based on the notion that excessive rational thought is a catalyst of conflict and war throughout the world. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence

Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th Century. André Breton consolidated Surrealism as a movement in the early 1920s, trying to achieve the “total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it[1]” through innovative and varied ideas. Surrealism deeply influenced the world in the era between the two world wars and played a big role in the diffusion and adoption of psychology worldwide. Surrealism faded after World War II, but its revolutionary genius has influenced every artistic movement ever since.

The artist depicts an initial confusing and weirded-out thought for the viewer at first glance, but as one deeply examines the art, the subject matter begins to become more clear. The vision being shared in this non-objective painting has a context of placing one in the standing of Mr. Man by gaining height and freedom from the (white) bars that are rising on each level that represent conflict which traps one in a “cage” of misery. The unbalanced symmetry of having the left side take up more space with little action, and the right side being smaller with the action unraveling, makes the viewer break down each composite perspective. For the left side, the mysterious female muse, Moon-Face, has an unproportional face that is almost blushing with shades of light pasty orange, with the mouth wide open. The energetic mood is amplified by the tone of yellow that is splashed in the mouth, representing a loss of words or at a state of disbelief. The female’s lower half is created with tints of red that enhances the curves on her body, as if chiaroscuro connects the light and dark contrast to show outline of the breasts, stomach, and hips in

Andre Breton founded the Surrealist movement in 1924 with his Manifesto of Surrealism which argued that art can benefit from an understanding of the Freudian dreamscape. His definitions of Surrealism were, “Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life” (Breton, 1924).

Although there are significant distinctions between Dadaism and Surrealist movement in their focus of interest in exploring the language and the art, they also happen to have similar concept for groundbreaking the norms and sometimes makes it hard for people to differentiate them. Then, here is an artist who manage to cover and is considered to be one of the pioneers for both Dadaism and Surrealism: Max Ernst. Due to the traumatic army experience during the World War 1, Ernst became highly critical of the western culture. His experience of the brutality of the world critically influenced his later works to become quite absurd, yet interesting like those of other Dadaists. In terms of relationship between the word and the image, Ernst created the so-called fatagaga, or Fabrication de Tableaux Gasometriques Garantis, which meant the combination of the artists to create an artwork including imagery and text. These Dadaist collaborative works deemphasized the importance of individual authorship and allowed the artists’ interactions to further development of Dadaism.

It developed out of Dadaism and depicted the world of enlightenment, i.e., surreal world. It was born soon after Dada, which emphasized metaphysical paintings inspired by the imagination and accidental juxtaposition of objects. It aimed to make people become more aware of poetic aspects, rather than scientific ones, by exploring and explaining unconscious mind and freeing imagination. Despite Dada’s limitations, the exploration of Freud’s suggestions done by surrealists opened countless new paths. Surrealism goes even further from nihilistic Dadaism, which denies humankind, society, order, ethics, and art, and pursued unconscious world, dream world, and automatic world, thus seeking a new artistic

When and Why? As we already known, this painting was created in 1943. During that period, the human being was suffered by the most horrible disaster, the Second World War. About 75 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians. Many of the civilians died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, disease, and starvation. At that time, Dali and his wife Gala were forced to leave homeland to America. As an artist, he did not have that power to stop this horrible massacre. Therefore, to relieve his feeling, he produced this famous painting, the

In 1519, Baldung comes back to the first mankind in his Adam and Eve woodcut, and creates the extreme version of human sexuality and their fallenness. Similar to the artist’s earlier pieces, Adam seizes Eve from behind, “but this time he is characterized as a sinister figure driven by his physical urges” (Brinkmann 214). In the image, Adam is represented as an image of a devil that captures Eve by a sudden alert. Eve, who is usually self-confident, shows fear in her eyes and turns towards this menacing figure of Adam, and breaks her typical gaze away from the audience. This piece correlates to the last piece of Death and the Maiden, in which, whether it is intentional or not, Eve’s sexual seduction of her nakedness serves as a sinful action

Salvador Dali was born into a middle class family on May 11th 1904 in Figures, Spain. During his lifetime, he was an eccentric painter, writer, sculptor and experimental film maker. In Dali’s early years of painting he experimented at first with landscapes, most of which were of his home in Figueres, Spain. Dali also made paintings of the surrounding area of his family’s summer home, in the seaside town of Cadaques. Dali’s transitional period was between 1927 and 1929, these were years of experimentation. In this period gravel, rocks, cork, and other materials can be noted on his canvases. This was more abstract period then others, at this time in Dali’s life he had just been kicked out of the art school he had been attending .

As mentioned surrealism, like Dadaism, tried to distance itself from contemporary culture and sought to shock the familiarity of reality. Hence, the unconscious has a centrepiece in surrealist art and the underlying theme was to create images of such unconscious situation or universes. This was primarily achieved with the use of symbolism and the placing of objects in unfamiliar settings. This would revitalize and redefine such objects outside the conventional reality that is the adversary in surrealist art and hence create the desired conflict between the conventional and the unconscious (Waldberg 1997; Martin 1987).