In Salvador Dali’s world

One of the most well-known artists in the XX century is the Catalan painter – Salvador Dali. He, the incredibly charismatic individualist, created multiple pieces of art, images on the verge of reality and dream. They left behind a very strong footprint in the artistic world.

Painting

Probably, the most popular painting of Dali is The Persistence of Memory. This image of soft, melting clocks has now become the symbol pop-culture and surrealism. It stands for the relativity of time and space, shows the fragile and faint nature of memories and our experiences.

Dali loved allegories and appreciated the possibility to dive deep into psychoanalysis of human disposition in his works. The Burning Giraffe would be a great example of his dedication to studying and unveiling behaviors, instincts and hidden characteristics of people. Against the most visceral assumption it is not the giraffe that you see in the foreground. An overwhelmingly great posture of woman, with half-rotten, bony body first catches the eye of a recipient. Several open drawers hanging out of her leg are a clear reference to Freudian psychoanalytic method. They serve as an illustration of people’s narcissistic predisposition. You can find the burning giraffe only in the background, used as a symbol of masculine apocalyptic monster. The whole painting is a metaphor of Dali’s personal struggle with a war in his home country.

Film

Apart from those surrealistic paintings, in 1929 Dali created also a movie entitled: An Andalusian Dog. The Catalan was a co-writer of the script working together with a film director Luis Bunuel. This piece is a short, silent movie that gave birth to surrealistic film genre. Everyone who has seen this video surely remembers the popular closing-scene. An eye cut with the use of a razor. It was one of the first films with “blood on the screen” aired in the cinema.

There is no doubt Salvador Dali was an eccentric and at the same time noted artists. He built solid foundations to what was later considered as a separate and unique trend in art – surrealism.