Explain the significance of Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings and techniques. Salvador Dali’s abstract paintings and techniques paved the way for the Surrealist art movement and as a result he is famed as one of the better known artists of the 20th century, especially in the United States. In his paintings Dali sought to create controversial sensations by implementing abstract concepts in a realistic manner onto a canvas. Dali delved deep into his subconscious to attain such perceptions of reality. He was a firm believer that people who thought rationally with logic were deprived in areas of imagination. Discovery of his unconscious mind was the focal point of study. He often described these artworks as “hand painted dream photographs”.
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Salvador Dali was a Surrealist. This meant he sought to tap into his unconscious mind to explore his own internal subconscious fantasies and primitivism to apply in his paintings. Dali initially followed Surrealist André Breton’s theory of automatism, but as time passed he elected an alternate method to delve into the unconscious. He branded this new method as “critical paranoia”; a way of cultivating delusions while maintaining his own sanity. Dali would later paradoxically describe the technique as a form of “irrational knowledge”.
When Salvador Dali was 16 years of age his mother died from breast cancer. Later in his life he wrote in his autobiography “this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. . . .I worshiped her. . . . I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that someday would savagely gleam around my glorious name!” Eight years after his mother’s death, Dali sketched the outline of Christ in an ink drawing with words bannered across it about spitting on his mother’s portrait. This infuriated Dali’s father and he was thrown out of the house. It is from this moment Dali was attracted to French Surrealist such as Jean Arp, René Magritte and Max Ernst. They were implementing psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali was fascinated by Freud’s ideas about sexual repression being encapsulated in the forms of dreams and delusions, which is what encouraged him to attempt to capture these dreams on a
Salvador Dali was a Surrealist. This meant he sought to tap into his unconscious mind to explore his own internal subconscious fantasies and primitivism to apply in his paintings. Dali initially followed Surrealist André Breton’s theory of automatism, but as time passed he elected an alternate method to delve into the unconscious. He branded this new method as “critical paranoia”; a way of cultivating delusions while maintaining his own sanity. Dali would later paradoxically describe the technique as a form of “irrational knowledge”.
When Salvador Dali was 16 years of age his mother died from breast cancer. Later in his life he wrote in his autobiography “this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. . . .I worshiped her. . . . I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that someday would savagely gleam around my glorious name!” Eight years after his mother’s death, Dali sketched the outline of Christ in an ink drawing with words bannered across it about spitting on his mother’s portrait. This infuriated Dali’s father and he was thrown out of the house. It is from this moment Dali was attracted to French Surrealist such as Jean Arp, René Magritte and Max Ernst. They were implementing psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali was fascinated by Freud’s ideas about sexual repression being encapsulated in the forms of dreams and delusions, which is what encouraged him to attempt to capture these dreams on a