Salvador Dali’s life and art were very closely related. Everything in his life was reflected in his art. All the major changes in his works and styles represented important turning points for him. When Dali was younger, he experimented with different styles.
The first style he used was soft, blurry and seemed a little bit out of focus, although his use shadowing was well from the beginning. Dali’s early works were not very impressive, but he was very talented and dedicated to his art work. Surrealism is a form of painting that Dali started using next. The purpose of this kind of art was to mirror society and show it what was wrong with it.
For example, Dali was not friendly with the aristocrats of his time, in fact he hated them. So one of his surrealist paintings showed an aristocrat with no face. This was supposed to symbolize that aristocrats did not listen to anyone. It was also during Dali’s surrealist period when he expressed many of his sexual ideas in his works. Some examples of these types of works would be The Apparatus and The Great Masturbater, and many other of Dali’s paintings possessed sexual meaning. This was also a period in his life when he was very interested in psychology, especially Freudian psychoanalysis.
Dali even showed Freud in some of his works. Surrealism was a important tool for Dali, using it he could express his feelings, dreams and political standings. His art sometimes seemed as if it was a way for him to put all the delirium in his head down on canvas, and that was what makes it so interesting. Surreal painting was where Dali first started using a extraordinary, fascinating style of art, that style is called double imagery. This was when he showed two different images in the same painting.
This time in his life was also emphasized because it was when he first meet his wife Gala. Gala was thirteen years older than Dali, and many people especially his father thought they were crazy for being lovers because of this age difference. It did not effect them though and they got married and stayed life long companions to each other. For this reason Gala was a very important part of his life and therefore appeared in many of Dali’s works. Gala was responsible for bring Salvador back to the Christian faith which completely changed his style of painting, from surrealism to classical.
These classical works were Dali’s most moving works. This was the time Dali was influenced by new beliefs and new discoveries. He was now more interested in science than ever before, and the recent discovery of the atom and the doublelhelix structure of DNA. He continued to use double imagery, and it was at this time when he created his majestic masterworks.
As a masterwork was over five feet in any direction and took over a year of Dali’s year to produce. These were sixteen larger than life works that were very inspiring. These masterworks were good examples of showing Dali’s understanding between science and religion. I think Dali was one heck of an artist, and his masterworks were phenomenal. I did not think I would like the museum, but I really enjoyed it and I would recommend for others to go see his works.
