Salvador Dalí described the birth of his masterpiece in his autobiography published in 1942, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: At the same time, the concept of persistence becomes a hoax: the sensations given by the painting are everything but a sign of persistence and solidity. If time is no longer reliable in the real life, how meaningful can it be in the dreamlike dimension? The persistence of time is therefore relative: time is unstable and volatile, and our memory is probably the only way to provide durability and stability. Time melts, abandoning any claim to be an absolute reference, with some references to Albert Einstein’s new Relativity Theory, according to which time became a flexible, questionable coordinate. It was the first appearance of the famous soft watches that will become one of Dalí ‘s most beloved symbols. Salvador Dal í, persistence of Memory, 1931 The year after, in 1931, Dalí painted the work that will give him global popularity, the one that will become one of the iconic paintings of the twentieth century: The Persistence of Memory. As a surrealist, he was part of one of the most lively artistic groups of those years, but he was still young, if compared with more experienced artists such as Max Ernst and Joan Miró.
It was 1930, and Dalì was only 26 years old. The landscapes of that area will often be protagonists in his artistic production. To facilitate the process of this liberation, artists used special practices such as painting in altered psycho-physical conditions, or stratagems like the Cadav re Exquis ( Exquisite Corpse), according to which a group of artists were able to compose a work in a blind collaboration, without knowing what the other was drawing.Īfter Dalí left home, he rented for him and Gala a small fishing cabin in Port Lligat, on the Mediterranean coast near the border between Spain and France. Surrealism’s secret mission was to let the unconscious contents be expressed without filters or barriers, freeing the contents which are usually filtered by consciousness and giving them a formal dignity. Dadaism was destructive towards any form of art and advocated the refusal of reason, while Surrealism carried out an escape from reality, in favour of the new human dimension recently discovered by Sigmund Freud’s studies: the unconscious.
In some respects, together with Dadaism it was an alternative response to World War I and the horror in realizing what mankind was able to do. Surrealism was a huge bomb exploded in Europe within the avant-garde years in the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will represent the most enduring expression.
Salvador Dalí, Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother (The Sacred Heart), 1929 His father always disapproved his relationship with Gala and his connections with the Surrealists group, but the last drop in the tensions between father and son was a surrealist exhibition of few days before, where Dalí presented a painting titled: “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother (The Sacred Heart)”. In his life, however, something like a true expulsion from Paradise took place some time later, precisely on December 28th, 1929: that was the day when his father forced him to leave home, threatening to disinherit him. It is said that in adulthood, Salvador Dalí will define the day of his birth as the reminiscence of the paradise lost.
0 kommentar(er)
