Gala Salvador Dali example essay topic

Salvador Dali is a brilliant painter and draftsman. More commonly, he was known as a leading Surrealist, probing the irrational and subconscious in his paintings. His style, whether cubist, abstract, realistic, paranoiac-critical, or stereoscopic, was always completely his own. His versatility, just like that of the artists of the Renaissance, manifests itself in several fields where he is helped by artisans whose language he speaks and whom he pushes to the extreme limits of their techniques. His genius, which would have been freely acknowledged, had it flowered in the Renaissance, is today so out of the ordinary, that it provokes our modern world of average bureaucrats. Recently, I was able to view Dorothy Spreckles Munn, which was painted by Dali in 1942.

Not only is this painting a fantastic example of his mastery, it also represents many of the reoccurring obsessive themes Dali enjoyed using in his pieces: surreal landscapes, bizarre figures, and his wife, Galarina. Dali's work is painted in a masterly fashion to show the private world of a genius; a world that, in its myriad details, speaks to all of us. He is able to create a splendid world of dreams, hallucinations, phantasms, and fractured realities. In the works of the Surrealist period, Dali treated those elements of disparate appearance with absolute realism, which emphasized the proper character of each one of them, making an exact copy from a document, a photograph, or the actual object, as well as using collage.

He increased the effect produced even more through the use of techniques stemming from the precision of Vermeer to the blurred shapes of Carriere. Once he had given an emotional autonomy to his protagonist, he established a communication by depicting them in space- most often in a landscape, thus creating unity in the canvas by the juxtaposition of objects bearing no relation, in an environment where they did not belong. In Dorothy Spreckles Munn, the light, due to the color of the sky and of the sea, seems to suspend the course of time and allows the mind through the eye to glide more easily from one point to another. Many of Dali's landscapes are said to have been referenced from Cada ques, but this particular composition is entirely imaginary. The still life and figure drawing occupy an important place in Dali's work, but the crucible in which he transforms beings and things, thus creating the most astonishing oneiric fresco of the contemporary epoch, is the landscape.

Dali's greatest intellectual and artistic honesty is probably never to have practiced any sophisticated, gymnastic aesthetics, in order to place the most disparate and most bizarre objects in his pictures. The Surrealist's ideology was based on Freudian psychology, which systematized the analysis of dreams as revealed in images from the subconscious. The faithful transcription of dreams has always played a major role in his work. His demonology owes a great deal to his reveries.

They have given birth to heterogeneous elements which he then brings together in his paintings without always knowing why. In this painting, the Mannerist and Baroque influences are obvious: Mannerism in the bizarre background figures with the elongated shapes, Baroque in the postures and movements, and the light treated in the style of Magna sco, which we can also see in Palladio's Thalia Corridor. The figures in the background represent order in apparent disorder, fixity in ostensible mobility, unity in diversity, and the indivisible principle of verticality in a world seemingly formless. This painting is supposedly a portrait of Ms. Dorothy Spreckles Munn, but is apparent that she was made in the image of Dali's wife and only love, Galarina Dali; the hair, eyes, and body shape are all one in the same.

The appearance of Gala was a revelation to Dali. According to him, "The most important events which can happen to a contemporary painter are two in number: 1) To be Spanish, and 2) To be named Gala Salvador Dali". Gala has often been depicted in Dali's works. One might even say that she is the only woman whose face and silhouette appear there incessantly. "She is the rarest being to see", says Dali, "The superstar who cannot in any case be compared with La Callas or Greta Garbo, because one may see them often, whereas Gala is an invisible being, the anti-exhibitionist par excellence. The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist", states Dali.

After witnessing Dorothy Spreckles Munn, like any Dali piece, a unique and scintillating world is presented to me, a world made possible only when reality, imagination, madness, and passion are mixed in Dali nian ways. His work is an illustration of the world- a mixture of Classic and Baroque, of monarchy and anarchy. His painting contains no prophetic ambition of the romantic type; it contents itself through his genius to reconstitute with clairvoyance images as exact as possible of each precise period lived through by the artist. Whether working from pure inspiration, or on a commissioned illustration, Dali's matchless insight and symbolic complexity are apparent. His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the art of the twentieth century. - web - web - web - web.