Salvador Dali E-Book

Keith Pointing

• Herausgeber: G2 Rights Ltd
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Salvador Dali was arguably the twentieth century's leading surrealist and this sumptuously illustrated monograph, now available as an eBook, provides a good introduction to his most famous paintings, including Swans Reflecting Elephants, Sublime Moment and The Persistence of Memory. View this eBook on your iPad or Android to fully appreciate the lavish full colour illustrations.

Leseprobe

TITLE PAGE

PARANOIAC - CRITICAL SOLITUDE.1935 The image is another example of the bizarre juxtaposition of images by the Surrealists. Dali seems to comment on the impermanence of material acquisition with the decaying car. This image anticipates his controversial Rainy Taxi installation at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

THE LIFE AND WORK of Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) generates extreme reactions. His story is underpinned by a series of paradoxes; born into a liberal, republican, affluent Spanish family, he came to be both monarchist and Catholic in later life; his art symbolised the Surrealist avant-garde of the 1930s, but its’ technique was founded on the discredited academic principles of the nineteenth century; he generated immense wealth from his work and idiosyncratic public profile, yet professed to despise late industrial capitalist society, and those members of it who fawned on him.

Dali began his training at the local drawing school at Figueras, under the academic painter Juan Nunez, learning academic compositional techniques and absorbing the works of Old Masters who were to fascinate him: Vermeer, Velazquez and Millet. Five years at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid were valuable only in terms of his exposure to the techniques of Parisian modernism, and the contacts he made.

Repeated insubordination led to Dali’s expulsion from Madrid in 1926. After successful exhibitions in Barcelona and collaboration with Bunuel over the film Un Chien Andalou, Dali’s first Parisian exhibition in 1929 cemented his arrival at the forefront of the Surrealist avant-garde.

The work from 1929-c.1932 is predominantly erotic, focusing on common sexual neuroses. Recurring themes and icons become clear in this period: insects, decay, guilt, mutilation, the grotesque. Steadily, Dali developed his own approach to painting, dubbed the ‘paranoiac-critical’ method. This involved the inducement of a state of delirium so that Dali could reproduce the images of a madman without any diminution of his critical faculties. The method saw Dali move towards fantastic and dream-like images, allowing him to address broader concerns such as the Spanish Civil War.

With the capitulation of France in 1940, the painter fled to New York. He continued to be interested in new developments, however, both in art and science, praising the work of the abstract expressionists and fascinated by newly developed atomic power. Moreover, his imagery mirrors an increasingly fervent affiliation with the Catholic Church.

After the death of his wife Gala in 1982, Dali spent his declining years in isolation. He died as a result of a fourth heart attack in January 1989, leaving behind a series of impenetrable myths and works that, whatever one’s opinion of them, stand as icons of the early twentieth century.