Salvador Dal'I example essay topic

Salvador Dal'i (Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dal'i i Domenech) was born May 11, 1904 in Figueras, Spain, which is a small town near Barcelona. His father was a notary and leading citizen in the town. Salvador had a very unusual childhood. His older brother, also named Salvador, died before he was born. They treated the new Salvador as though he was their first son. The second Salvador was very confused growing up because of this.

Dal'i acted very differently from other children. He had strange dreams and fears and always wanted attention. He would throw fits of hysteria and acts of rage at his family and playmates. On several occasions, Dal'i flung himself down a stone staircase to frighten his classmates. He spent his childhood in Figueras and at the family's summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques.

Dal'i was educated first at public school, later in a private academy in Figueras conducted by Brothers of the Marist Order. Dal'i had a great imagination and became interested in art as early as eight years old. At age 22, he attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1921 and had not yet decided what direction his art would take. In 1924, Dal'i was suspended from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts for a year on a charge of causing the students to revolt against school authorities. He was later imprisoned at Figueras and Gerona for anti-government activity. After all of that, he returned to art school and received early recognition with a one-man show, held in Barcelona in 1925.

He received international fame when three of his paintings were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. Dal'i was later expelled from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts for extravagant personal behavior. This didn't matter much to Dal'i because he had grown tired of the old-fashioned way of art taught by the school. Dal'i was more interested in the new styles of art being invented in Paris, France. He had seen some of Pablo Picasso's paintings and liked them a lot.

He met Picasso on some of his trips to Paris. Some of Dal'i's early work looks much like Picasso's. Dal'i also became interested in a group of artists and writers in Paris known as the surrealists. They painted what was remembered from their dreams or what popped into their minds.

They hoped it would help people have feelings they had never had before. The surrealists asked Dal'i to join their group because they liked his paintings. They liked his paintings so much that they all traveled to Spain with him to watch him paint at his house. Dal'i fell in love with a surrealist poet's wife, named Gala Eduard.

After divorcing her husband, Gala and Dal'i got married. Dal'i had Gala as a model in many of his paintings. Dal'i was also influenced by Sigmund Freud's writings on the significance of dreams. Dal'i's paintings were becoming very popular in Europe and America, although "he depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion". Some of the surrealists thought that some of his paintings were too strange and Dal'i left their group.

In the late 30's, Dal'i painted in a more academic style under the influence of Raphael, a Renaissance painter. From 1950-1970, Dal'i painted religious things while exploring erotic subjects representing his childhood memories and his wife Gala. Dal'i's health began to decline in 1982, after Gala's death. He was severely burned in a fire in Gala's castle in Publ, Spain, in 1984. A pacemaker was implanted in his heart.

Much of his last years were spent in total seclusion in his private room in the Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo Dal'i. On January 23, 1989, Salvador Dal'i died from heart and respiratory failure. Salvador Dal'i is one of the few artists that was as famous as his artwork. There are five interesting facts about him. First, even after Dal'i was a grown man, he still did things to get attention.

For example, he arrived at an event in a limousine filled with cauliflowers. He also gave a talk about his art while wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He stated he received messages from outer space through his moustache that acted as an antenna. Second, he tried to enter the subconscious world while he was painting in order to bring up subconscious imagery.

For example, he attempted to stimulate insanity while painting. He also tried setting up his canvas at the base of his bed to paint before sleeping and when he woke up. Third, his paintings up close looked like photographs. Dal'i worked with tiny brushes to make is brush marks as tiny and as invisible as possible. Dal'i sometimes painted with artificial light and a jeweler's eyepiece. Certain images repeated themselves in his art.

For example, eyes, hands, hands, noses, crutches, clouds, mountains, blood, soft bodies, and objects. He had a fetish about crutches. Dal'i often hid images and faces within his paintings. Many of his paintings are self-portraits. He often showed that things aren't often what they appear to be at first glance. Fourth, Dal'i accomplished many other things during his life.

He designed clothes, fancy perfume bottles, ads for magazines, worked with famous movie makers including Walt Disney, and wrote his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal'i. Lastly, Dal'i has a museum in Cadaques, Spain, the coastal fishing village that he loved. He would always return there during the summers on a bus that was transformed into a piece of artwork itself..