Salvador Dali

Surrealist Art

Surrealism started out as an artistic movement that was launched by the French poet Andre Breton in 1924 and it began as a revolutionary response to the devastations of the First World War Also, was inspired by the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud.

Freud believed that all of us have got an inner unconscious world and which our emotional and sexual feelings are repressed and that the only way to express ourselves is to release these emotions but without censoring what comes out. Surrealist's were fascinated by the bizarre and quickly decided that they needed to explore this new forbidden landscape of the unconscious mind.

'The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, Mother' - Salvador Dali - 1929

Salvador Dali 

Dali really homed our understanding of the absurd showing us that anything is possible and brought to life extraordinary dream worlds in his vivid surrealist paintings.

Surrealism is something that conjures a sense of the bizarre and the unexpected or the irrational. The fact that we do is entirely thanks to Dali who brought surrealism into the mainstream.

 'The Great Masturbator - Salvador Dali - 1929

Dali paints impossible worlds but in an incredibly realistic way, this may be because most of Dali's paintings are based on the dramatic coast line of the north east corner of Spain, a place Dali grew up and loved.

Through Surrealism Dali could express himself with impunity and put onto the canvas all of his inner desires, fears, obsessions and anxieties.

'Swans Reflecting Elephants' - Salvador Dali - 1937

To extract these strange visions from his deepest psyche, Dali developed a technique that he called the 'Paranoiac Critical Method' based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories. 'Paranoiac Critical Method' is the notion of paranoia which Dali saw as a mechanism in the construction of reality.

'Portrait of Picasso' - Salvador Dali - 1947

For example, when we see a natural object such as rocks or a tree, we can see the human form or something looking at us which would be classified as a paranoid delusion. Dali explored and developed this idea in his paintings putting double images and meanings into them.

Dali's paintings all feature similar elements of desolate landscapes, stark light, sharp shadows, mutating/mutated displaced objects, and optical illusions for example in one painting a half kneeling figure can also look like a giant hand holding an egg, or a group of villagers sat next a hut and some trees turned to its side becomes a woman's face.

'Metamorphosis of Narcissus' - Salvador Dali - 1937

'Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey - One of Dali's earliest paintings where a shore is scattered with strange objects that represent his childhood and adult anxieties. Inspired by Freud's ideas he's liberating his unconscious obsessions through his art, death and sex (the dead deer and the naked female body with a decapitated head).

'Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey' - Salvador Dali - 1926

'Persistence of Memory' - Probably Dali's most popular painting and has been reproduced and parodied everywhere from kids shows Sesame Street to animation television series The Simpsons.

It features melting clocks, ants on a stopwatch and another melting clock on an object what looks like a face if turned to its side (this hidden face features in many of Dali's paintings).

With this paining Dali is exploring ideas of time and dreams and even fantasies and fears. There is something very strange about the painting; it has a strange, airless quality of a dream but one that is quite unsettling. It's as if Dali has taken our intangible anxieties about time passing and mortality and crystallised them in paint. The title also gives clue to the meaning behind the painting. For me personally I get the impression that Dali is showing his fear of time and how with time comes ages and with age comes the diminishing of memory as the brain & body becomes frail and old.

'Persistence of Memory' - Salvador Dali - 1931

'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' - Salvador Dali - 1946