SURREALISM: Salvador Dalí

SURREALISM

Founded in Paris in 1924. It started as a literary group strongly allied to the Dada movement. André Breton (French writer and poet) is considered the founder of the movement.

“pure psychic automatism”

Inspired by Freud, artists were looking tochannel the unconscious through the powerof imagination .

Surrealists believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of imagination, weighting it down with taboos.

By: Ramaz Razmadze

Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution

The Surrealists generated creative works that exposed the artists' inner minds in bizarre, symbolic ways in order touncover anxieties and to treat them analytically throughvisual means.

This is considered the most influential movement in 20th century art. Figures like Dalí and Ray not only had an important influence on avant-garde art, but through their commercial work (fashion photography, advertising and film) they brought the style to a huge popular audience

Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942.

Rene Magritte, Empire of Light, 1953-54

Luis Banuel and Salvador Dalí Un Chien Andalou, 1929

Salvador Dalí 1904 – 1989, Spain

Dali is among the most versatile artists of the twentieth century. Though mainlyremembered for his paintings, he alsoturned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and filmmaking, collaborating with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock.

Dalí and SurrealismIn the 1920s he was a Cubist, greatly influenced by Picasso. In 1929, he met Breton at an exhibition, who invited him tojoin the Surrealists.

The Persistence of memory, 1931

The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table, 1934

For the next several years, Dalí´s paintings were Illustrative of histheories about the psychologicalstate of paranoia. He painted bodies, bones, and symbolic objects that reflected sexualized fears of father figures, as well as figures that reflect the anxiousness of the passing of time.

In 1934, Breton accused him of defending the ‘Hitler Phenomenon´ and expelled him from the Surrealists.

In 1937, he moved to Italy and practiced more traditional painting styles

DID YOU KNOW …?

• He was named after his dead brother

• After his mother died in 1921 he married his aunt.

• His contemporaries called him a Sell Out

• He was slightly obsessed with Hitler: ‘I often dream of Hitler as a woman´

• Critics consider all he painted after the age of 40 to be worthless

Sources:

• http://flavorwire.com/334202/the-10-most-surreal-moments-of-surrealism

• http://www.theartstory.org/artist-dali-salvador.htm

• http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm#

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD

• http://celebrities.top5.com/top-5-amazing-facts-about-salvador-dali/