Art
1904 To Money Heist: Salvador Dali
Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.
Everyone loves perfection. We see millions of artists, past and present, who produce images of precision, capturing the reality with canvas, paint, and brush. We applaud the beguilingly realistic smile of Mona Lisa, the life-like portraits of Caravaggio, and many other others who represent realism.
What if paintings could warp the perception? What if they could piece together disparate chunks of reality and make an amalgam that is beautiful despite being an anomaly?
Surrealism
Surrealism is a concoction where the artists produce a juxtaposition of uncommon imagery. More than just representing art, Surrealism spread out further, deepening its root in politics as well. It started representing freedom of thought and speech.
Soon Surrealism became a cultural movement. The Movement gained momentum right after World War I, where the idea was creating a “dream-like reality” or “super-reality”. Tons of artist emerged, propagating the unimaginably uncommon mosaic of reality — Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Breton — each magnificent in their way.
But no one could epitomize Surrealism better than Salvador Dali.
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. — Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was a Spanish Surrealist known for his bizarre paintings and sculptures. He was born on 11th May 1904 in Catalonia, Spain. From a young age, he was influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance. By the late 1920s, he was deeply into Surrealism and joined the Surrealist group in 1929 (The year he painted the Great Masturbator).
His common theme was generally a mishmash of science, religion, animals, and sexuality. He was especially attracted to the idea of a female praying mantis feeding on the male during coitus (In the above image, note the upside-down praying mantis).
Almost all of his paintings contained sexual undertones. Though his works bordered on erotic, the concept being highly platonic.
For instance, take the painting, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity from 1954.
The painting shows a naked woman who is about to be penetrated by the horn of rhinoceros. But it symbolizes the chastity of a virgin woman.
“Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all.” — Salvador Dali.
Interestingly, Dali’s wife, Gala Dali, seems to be the muse behind most of his paintings involving women. Take the instance of Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening from the year 1944 (It’s the long titles that peeve me out!). The woman lying on the piece of ground is based on his wife.
But the painting that touched people and brought accolades to the concept of Surrealism was The Persistence of Memory, painted in the year 1931. The picture is a delightful mixture of science, animals (notice the ants on the clock), and reality. It portrays the melting of stopwatches, indicating that despite the decay of time, memories endure.
Salvador Dali’s paintings display a timelessness and a sense of modernity that could not be expected during his timeline. His portrayal of women might seem like objectification at the first glance, but from the women’s posture, it is apparent that they are confident with their sexuality and are not reluctant to reveal it. Moreover, their casual stance flaunts comfort instead of eroticism.
What sets him apart is the combining of entirely diverse shards of reality from various themes.
From 1904 to now, Salvador Dali has been commended as a phenomenal Surrealist, that the Netflix Series, Money Heist, found a way to commemorate him — with the Dali mask.
