The work of Salvador Dalí

¶ … Salvador Dali

As one of the greatest exponents of surrealism, Salvador Dali's artistic intention was to discover and explore what A. Reynolds Morse describes as "the more real than real world behind reality... The world of psychic experience as revealed by psychoanalytical research by such men as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung" (78). Thus, Dali's artistic aim was to resolve conscious and subconscious reality into a new and exciting reality, a super-reality and thus reclaim man as a psychological being instead of one made up of anatomy.

For Salvador Dali, his dominant motivation as a surrealist was to bring together into a single painting the various aspects of outer and inner reality, such as those usually found in dreams and nightmares, but to accomplish this, Dali realized that new painting techniques had to be created in order bring about a true pictorial world. Thus, in many of his paintings, Dali created a world without meaning to the common viewer and provoked reactions in the viewer based on his subconscious experiences.

As a new artistic form, surrealism was conceived and adapted from abstraction, and many of the paintings of Dali express this abstraction in powerful and novel ways, especially through his ability to abstract the natural appearance of an object or figures while still retaining some vestiges of their natural shape or form.

In the works of Salvador Dali, the divergent nature of his renderings are full of dream imagery, being "all forms of non-conscious experience, both common and vivid" (Soby, 156) which require a great mastery of abstract design and thought on the part of the artist. In order to project this world of dreams and nightmares on canvas, Dali studied in great detail the masters of 17th century realism, especially the Dutch masters of this genre. Because dreams, objects and situations seems to create and thrive upon constant metamorphoses, Dali utilized multiple images with multiple symbolic meaning to suggest ideas and forms from his subconscious mind.

Several aspects of his style can be readily seen in his most famous work, The Persistence of Memory (1931, oil on canvas), presently held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In this painting, Dali creates a very haunting allegory of space in which the existence of time is no more. The barren landscape, without a well-defined horizon, appears to drift into infinity, much like the mind of a person during the dream state, and is lit by a very eerie sun, far below the horizon and in a perpetual state of setting. In the foreground, what appears to be an unidentified and mysterious sleeping creature draped with a melting pocket watch. Another pocket watch, much like melting plastic, hangs from the branch of a dead tree, while another watch drips half-way over the edge of a rectangular block.

These watches are also infested with ants and a fly as if the watches were some kind of decaying life. Thus, the imagery suggests that since the watches are metallic objects in reality, "they have metamorphosed into objects that serve as food for ants, flies and invisible microbes and bacteria which live in this sterile and contradictory world" (Gaunt, 89).