| Salvador Essay, Research Paper
As a young man, Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in
Madrid. Early recognition of Dali’s talent came with his first one-man
show, held in Barcelona in 1925. He recieved international fame when
three of his paintings were shown in the third annual Carnegie
International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. In a way, this was was his
prime ’starting block’.
After this, Dali went to Paris the following year, again holding a one-man
show, and at this point Dali joined the Paris Surrealist Group. It was in this
same year that Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques
with her husband, the French poet Paul Eluard. She became Dali’s lover,
muse, business manager, and the source of inspiration for many of Dali’s
greatest works. They were married in 1934 at a civil ceremony and made
their first trip to America.
Dali emerged as a leader of the Surrealist movement and his painting,
Persistence of Memory (1931) is still one of the best known surrealist
works. But, as war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the
Surrealists and he was expelled during a trial conducted by the group in
1934. Although he did exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions
throughout the decade, asserting that: “le Surrealisme c’est moi” by
1940 he was ready to move into a new era, one that he termed “classic.”
During World War II Dali and his wife, Gala, took refuge in the United
States, returning after the war’s end to Spain. His international reputation
continued to grow, based as much on his flamboyance and flair for
publicity as on his prodigious output of paintings, graphic works, and book
illustrations; and designs for jewellrey, textiles, clothing, costumes, shop
interiors, and stage sets. His writings include poetry, fiction, and a
controversial autobiography, `The Secret Life of Salvador Dali’.
Dali returned to the Catholic faith of his youth and he and Gala were
married in a second ceremony in 1958, this time in a chapel near Girona,
Spain.
Dali produced two films – `An Andalusian Dog’(1928) and `The Golden
Age’(1930) – in collaboration with Bunuel. Considered surrealist classics,
they are filled with grotesque images. `The Persistence of Memory’,
painted in 1931, is perhaps the most widely recognized surrealist painting
in the world.
In 1974 Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in Figueres. This was followed
by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade.
After Gala’s death in 1982, Dali’s health began to fail. It deteriorated
further after he was severely burned in a fire in Gala’s castle in Pubol,
Spain, in 1984. Two years later, a pacemaker was implanted. Much of the
years 1980-89 were spent in almost total seclusion, first in Pubol and later
in his private room in the Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo
Dali.
On January 23, 1989, Salvador Dali died in a hospital in Figueres
from heart failure and respiratory complications.
“The Vision of Hell (1962) is a highly
sophisticated painting that juxtaposes
Salvador Dali’s earlier style, Surrealism, (for
which he was most famous) with a more
classical style of religious mysticism which he
developed later in life.
Most critics believe that Dali’s greatest works
were those done during his Surrealistic
period, (before the 1940’s). It was then that
Dali, greatly influenced by Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams tried to enter the
subconscious world while he was painting, in
order to fathom subconscious imagery. To
this end he tried various methods. For
example, he attempted to simulate insanity while painting, and he tried
setting up his canvas at the base of his bed to paint before sleeping and
upon rising.
During this period of his life certain images repeated themselves in his art:
eyes, hands, noses, bones, crutches, clouds, mountains, blood, soft
bodies and/or objects. In Vision of Hell we find all of these symbols, called
cliches by some critics, but, here they seem to be much more than a trite
convention. They are an expression of Dali himself. Too Dali uses the
techniques of double images, hidden appearances, counter appearances.
It is important to note that although in the early 1960’s (the time when
Vision of Hell was painted) Dali’s art was pejoratively classified as
“academic”, “religious,” and “mystic,” and despite the fact that he was, at
the time, often excluded from the company if Surrealists, Dali deliberately
chose the lapse into his previous surrealist style to accomplish these
portrayal of hell. Note, his old style, surrealism,dominates these portrayal
of hell (the left side of the painting), while his newer style of “Religious
Mysticism” is used on the right side of the painting in the portrayal of Our
Lady of Fatima. A close look at Our Lady of Fatima shows that an
experimental technique was used around the upper body of Our Lady. The
paint has texture. It is interesting to note that Dali does not use his wife
Gala as the subject for his portrayal of Mary, as he had in previous
portrayals of Our Lady (The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949,1950));
however, in vision of hell Our Lady of Fatima does hold her hands open in
a similar way as the Madonna of Port Lligat.
hree major influences (other than Gala, who
was ALWAYS Dali’s chief muse) inspired Dali
to create this Masterwork, which is more
than 14 feet tall. The first of these was the
appraching 300th anniversary of the death of
Velazques, who was very important to Dali.
The second was that there was considerable
academic debate at the time regarding the
true nationality of Columbus. Some were
asserting that Columbus had been Catalonian
rather than Italian, and Dali seized upon this
opportunity to further glorify his wondrous
Catalonia. FInally, the gallery which
commissioned Dali to paint this work, the
Huntington Hartford Gallery, was situated on
Columbus Circle in New York City. The combination of these 3 things was
enough to inspire Dali to wondrous heights of creativity.
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