Savador Dali

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade April 2001

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

Downloaded 11 times

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was born and died in Figueras, Spain. His older brother died at birth, so his parents treated him as the oldest son and named him after his brother. This confused and troubled Dali as a child. Salvador Dali often showed things in his paintings that he remembered from his childhood, even the things that frightened him. Even after he grew up, Dali kept doing things to get attention, like arriving at an event in a limousine filled with cauliflowers, or giving a talk about his art while wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He said he received messages from outer space through his moustache, which acted like an antenna.

Futurism, chirico, and surrealism influenced Dali's paintings. His paintings were often of mysterious objects oddly changed. In the late 1930s Dali switched to painting in a more academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and as a consequence he was expelled from the Surrealist movement.

He is best known for his paintings, but he accomplished many other things during his life. Dali made his own films. He was a very good writer, too. He also designed clothes, fancy perfume bottles, and ads for magazines, and he worked with famous moviemakers in Hollywood, including Walt Disney. He spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry.

Salvador Dali founded the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation to promote and protect his works and artistic stature. He was very confident in his work and shared it in creative and exciting ways.

The Persistence of Memory used a series of strange and disturbing images to render a "paranoid" dream in which time, forms, and space have been distorted in a frighteningly real way. The wilting clocks represent a lapse of time into a new and...