SALVADOR DALI's MIND BLOWING WORLD - PART 2
Salvador Dali - Agent Provocateur of Modern Art
"Every morning, upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali."
Salvador Dali
"Every morning, upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali."
Salvador Dali
#16 The Burning Giraffe (1937)
This painting shows his personal struggle with the battle in his home country. Characteristic are the opened drawers in the blue female figure, which Dalí on a later date described as "Femme-coccyx" (tail bone woman). This phenomenon can be traced back to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical method, much admired by Dali.[source]
#17 Inventions of the Monsters (1937)
Dalí explained: "According to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war. The canvas was painted in the Semmering mountains near Vienna a few months before the Anschluss [the 1938 political union of Austria and Germany] and has a prophetic character. Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster." [source]
#18 The Meditative Rose
The rose here is floating in space, a blossom without stem suspended over, and completely and utterly dwarfing, a dreary landscape. Two tiny figures are visible on the ground below it, indicating the rose's massive scale.[source]
#19 Visions of Eternity (1936-1937)
No doubt about it, this is doom and gloom at its finest. This painting is all about The Great Emptiness. We have a wanderer in the background, and a dark shadow figure who is quite literally coming apart at the seams.[source]
#20 Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
At one glance the spectator sees a desolate beach; at another a face; at another a footed dish filled with pears; and again a profile of a dog. These images are fragmented further: the dog's collar becomes a bridge, his head a hill. The instability of appearances fascinated Dali who sought to evoke the world of the unconscious by creating these "multi-valent" images. The meticulously rendered objects and fragments make the metamorphoses and unexpected juxtapositions of the objects even more startling.[source]
#21 Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939)
The painting depicts the child star Shirley Temple as a sphinx. Shirley Temple's head, taken from a newspaper photograph, is superimposed on the body of a red lioness with breasts and white claws. On top of the head is a vampire bat. Surrounding the sphinx are a human skull and other bones, suggesting her latest kill. At the bottom of the painting is a trompe-l'œil label that reads: "Shirley!. at last in Technicolor." The painting has been described as a satire on the sexualization of child stars by Hollywood.[source]
#22 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
Perhaps no other example of double-imagery in Dali’s art is as perfected and well-known as that in “Slave Market.” In the center of the canvas you’ll see an archway, under which several people appear. Two women, side by side and dressed in black and white outfits, become integral to the sudden appearance of the bust of Voltaire. Each of the women’s heads becomes an eye of Voltaire, while the front of their garments forms his nose, cheeks and chin. The distant space seen through the archway becomes Voltaire’s head.[source]
#23 The Face of War (1940)
The 3 year long Second Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 dashing the hopes of the fledgling republic which became a repressive fascist dictatorship. World War Two commenced simultaneously giving the entire globe the appearance of war. Dali's painting the Face of War represents his feelings of war - endlessly repeating death and decay.[source]
#24 Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)
While working on this painting, Dali jotted down the following list of words which help summarize the period of change: “Parachute, paranaissance, protection, cupola, placenta, Catholicism, egg, earthly distortion, biological ellipse.”[source]
#25 Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. (1944)
Dream purportedly depicts Gala, Dalí’s wife, in the midst of a dream. The bee and pomegranate of the title hover below Gala’s body. The fish, tigers, and rifle all seem poised to attack her, but they clearly stand as symbols of unconscious desires.[Source]
#26 Basket of Bread (1945)
Dali saying “Stop everything! I want to step out of my surrealism mode, and my Nuclear-Mysticism mode, and remind the world that I could just as well have been famous for being a leading exponent of Realism, instead of Surrealism!”[source]
#27 The Apotheosis of Homer (1945)
Platzner hypothesizes that Dali "reduces Homer to a broken bit of statuary, a relic, while the solid temple of the muse itself melts"... The "ethereal horse," which may be Pegasus, casting off riders attempting to reach the stars again signals myth's cessation as a legitimate method of contemplating humanity's existence and signals the changing state of not only art, but also thought and reasoning as well.[source]
#28 The Elephants (1948)
Dali’s elephants have skinny, fragile, long legs. They symbolise men shackled to the earth by gravity but always reaching for the higher. Because of that the legs get longer and longer but the feet stay attached to the ground.[Source]
#29 Leda Atomica (1949)
Dali himself described “Leda Atomica” as a picture created “in accordance with the modern ‘nothing touches’ theory of intra – atomic Physics”. “Leda does not touch the swan; Leda does not touch the pedestal; the pedestal does not touch the base; the base does not touch the sea; the sea does not touch the shore. . . .”[source]
#30 Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)
Although it is a depiction of the crucifixion, it is devoid of nails, blood, and a crown of thorns, because, according to Dali, he was convinced by a dream that these features would mar his depiction of Christ. Also in a dream, the importance of depicting Christ in the extreme angle evident in the painting was revealed to him.[source]
Which one is your favorite and why?
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