Painting. World artists. Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali typifies in his art the Surrealist movement at its height in the 1930s. After his visit to Paris in 1928 Dali experimented briefly with semi-abstract forms, as he was then under the influence of Picasso. Soon Dali set out on his individual path, based on his study of Freud, which seemed to clarify to him his personal fantasies and obsessions. Dali began producing what he called "hand-coloured photographs of the subconscious." His desire to "materialise images of concrete irrationality with the utmost imperialist fury of precision" resulted in pictures of a quality and brilliance that cannot be ignored, done in bright colour, with an exactitude of statement that at times recalls less his idols Vermeer and Velazquez than the technique of the Netherlandish masters of the fifteenth century. Dali's terrifying images are always brought home with tremendous force by the magical virtuosity of his draughtsmanship and colour.

The Persistence of Memory, of 1931, is one of Dali's most striking and best-known early Surrealist paintings. Dali said the idea for the work occurred to him while he was eating ripe Cam-embert cheese. The "wet watches", as they were termed by the astonished, horrified and fascinated New York public when the picture was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, are disturbing in their destruction of the very idea of time. Three watches lie or hang limply, and the fourth is devoured by ants while a severed chinless head - its tongue hanging from its nose, its enormous eyelashes extended on its cheeks - lies equally limp on a barren plain. In the background, rendered with hallucinatory clarity, are the rocky cliffs of a Catalan bay.

A contrast to this small picture is the larger and overpowering Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War, painted in 1936. Monstrous fragments of humans - arms, a breast being squeezed by a clawlike hand, a convulsed and screaming head - tower against a desolate sky partly covered with filmy clouds. The rocky terrain in the foreground pullulates with beans, while above one clenched fist a tiny bearded man gazes disconsolately at the scene. One of the most frightful images in the entire history of art, this picture is nonetheless, endowed by Dali's astonishing skill with an unexpected and terrible beauty.

After considerable activity in the fields of stage design, jewellery design, and even shop window decoration, Dali moved to Christian art. His technique is brilliant and his fantasy is magical.
 

Literature: Book "Western European art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva