Salvador Dali

One of the few household names in the history of art belongs to a leading Surrealist figure, the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). His reputation for leading an unusual – one could say surreal – life would seem to precede his art, because many people not familiar with his canvases had seen Dalí’s outrageous mustache and knew of his shenanigans. Once, as a guest on Ed Sullivan’s television show, he threw open cans of paint at a huge canvas.

Dalí began his painting career, however, in a somewhat more conservative manner, adopting, in turn, Impressionist, pointillist, and Futurist styles. Following these forays into contemporary styles, he sought academic training at the royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid This experience steeped him in a tradition of illusionistic realism that he never abandoned.

In what may be Dalí’s most famous canvas, The Persistence of Memory, the drama of the dreamlike imagery is enhanced by his trompe l’oeil technique. In this work, which the artists called a “dream photograph,” Dalí uses precise representation of Surrealistic objects. Here, in a barren landscape of incongruous forms, time, as almost all else, has expired. A watch is left crawling with insects like scavengers over carrion, suggestive of decay; three other watches hang limp and useless over a rectangular block, a dead tree, and a lifeless, amorphous creature that bears a curious resemblance to Dalí. The artist conveys the world of the dream, juxtaposing unrelated objects in an extraordinary situation. But a haunting sense of reality threatens the line between perception and imagination. Dalí’s is, in the true definition of the term, a surreality – or reality above and beyond reality.^[1]