Dalí, Salvador (1904–1989)

Salvador Dali was an artist, self-publicist, showman, screenplay writer, poet, and clothing designer. His many occupations and interests took on his own unique style, which he considered to be true surrealism. As a surrealist, he expressed the unconscious mind such as what might be seen or thought of in dreams. Because time does not take on a solid form in the unconscious mind, Dali found the idea of time fascinating and often used the idea in many of his paintings. Dali was awarded the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, the highest Spanish decoration. In December 1936, Dali appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Dali was born to a middle-class family in the Catalan town of Figueres on May 11, 1904. Later in life, he and his wife, Gala, built their home in the nearby Port Lligat, where they would retreat for solitude and a chance to rejuvenate. The nearby scenery of rocks and cliffs often provided the landscape for the background in Dali's paintings.

Although his father and mother did not encourage the youthful Dali to pursue an artistic career, others—such as the nearby Pichot family and his drawing teacher Juan Nunez—encouraged him in his dream career. In the early 1920s Dali went to Madrid to study painting and was drawn to the surrealist movement then attracting the attention of avant-garde artists. Many of his most famous paintings come from the late 1920s and the 1930s. In his paintings Dali would invest an irrational object with symbolic significance, but no matter how bizarre the images in his paintings seemed, the technique and details of the objects were on an academic level of accuracy. For this, Dali was considered a craftsman and a technical virtuoso.

Dali used symbolism in his works referring to time. Many of the forms in his paintings are characterized by a certain fluidity, as if to demonstrate that nothing contained in the human mind is fully formed and rational. Grasshoppers or locusts, of which he had a particular phobia, appear in his works as symbols of fear and waste. Open drawers imply the presence of the unconscious mind, open for thoughts to come and go as they please. In many paintings he depicted eggs, which convey a sense of prenatal hope and love. Also, crutches, which symbolize the fragility of reality when in the mind, are a Dali trademark. The crutches hold up and support reality so it can keep its form.

In the 1930s, Dali spent time in Italy studying the art of the Renaissance. Many of his paintings show the influence of great painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Velazquez. Later in his career, Dali took a step toward mysticism. This step was influenced by the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II, which engendered ideas concerning nuclear physics and the universe being made from particles. Many objects in his paintings would take fragmented forms as Dali tried to show fragmented parts of an object coming together to create the one object as a whole.

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