"paranoiac-critical activity." Dalí's most characteristic works show the influence not only of the surrealists but also of the Italian Renaissance masters.
During World War II Dalí 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 jewelry, textiles, clothing, costumes, shop interiors, and stage sets.
Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí remains an enigma as a man and as an artist. A curious blend of reality and fantasy characterizes both his life and his works.
Despite all that has been written by and about him, Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí remains an enigma as a man and as an artist. A curious blend of reality and fantasy characterizes both his life and his works.
In the Catalan town of Figueras, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born in 1904. Encouraged by his family, in 1921 Dalí enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid.
Dalí soon came under the influence of two forces that shaped his philosophy and his art. The first was Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, introduced to Dalí in Freud's book "The Interpretation of Dreams." The second was his association with the French surrealists, a group of artists and writers led by the poet Andre Breton. Dalí was introduced to the leading surrealists in Paris in 1928. The following year he settled there, becoming in a short time one of the best-known members of the group.
During the 1930's his paintings were included in surrealist shows in most major European cities and in the United States.
Under the influence of the surrealist movement, Dalí's artistic style formed into the blend of precise realism and dreamlike fantasy that became his hallmark. Against desolate landscapes he juxtaposed incongruous, unrelated, and often bizarre objects. These pictures, described by Dalí as "hand-painted dream photographs," are inspired by dreams, hallucinations and other unconscious forces that the artist is unable to explain; they are produced by a creative method he calls "paranoiac-critical activity." Dalí's most characteristic works show the influence not only of the surrealists but also of the Italian Renaissance masters.