Salvador DaliJoin now to read essay Salvador DaliSalvador DaliBorn into a middle-class family, Salvador Dali studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he mastered his academic techniques. DalŠ½ also pursued his personal interest in Cubism and Futurism and was expelled from the academy for indiscipline in 1923. He read Freud with enthusiasm and held his first one-man show in Barcelona (1925), where he exhibited a number of seascapes. He wrote the screenplay for BuŃuels āUn Chien Andalouā, which is why he was adopted by the Surrealists. In Paris he met artists Picasso and Breton, and his involvement from 1929 onwards, his flair for getting publicity through scandal and his liveliness which counterbalanced the political difficulties encountered by the group, made him a particularly welcome addition.
Over the next few years DalŠ½ devoted himself with passionate intensity to developing his method, which he described as paranoiac-critical, a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations. Pretty cool, if you ask me. It enabled him to demonstrate his personal obsessions and fantasies by uncovering and carefully fashioning hidden forms within pre-existing ones, either randomly selected (like, postcards or beach scenes) or of an accepted artistic rule (canvases by artist, Millet, for example). It was at this period that he was producing works like The Lugubrious Game (1929), The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Surrealist Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory (1932). Flaccid shapes, morphed, and double-sided figures producing a shadow effect combine in these works to create an unexpected universe a fascination for decay.
DalŠ½s extreme statements on political matters, in particular his fascination for Hitler, struck a false note in the context of the Surrealist ethic and his relations with the rest of the group became increasingly strained after 1934. The break finally came when the painter declared his support for Franco in 1939. And yet he could boast that he had the backing of Freud himself, who declared in 1938 that DalŠ½ was the only interesting case in a movement whose aims he confessed not to understand. Moreover, in the eyes of the public he was, increasingly as time went by, āthe Surrealist par excellenceā. He did his best to maintain, by way of excessive exhibitionism in every area, this amazing reputation.
The exhibition of the exhibition in the Gallery of Thesaurus of the German Library can be regarded as particularly interesting when considering the period of its first half-century in which it took place. There are various reasons, particularly the latter in the case of its early half-year, when DalŠ½’s exhibition was at first seen in the gallery, as to its lack of emphasis on any political or political ideology ā or even any kind of general policy ā and its emphasis on a certain range of abstract, esoteric subjects. These were also the reasons why DalŠ½ did not accept the appointment to act in this role because he was a man of high moral integrity (and an activist). The exhibition has now been described as being “conceivedā¦ not just in a political sense, but in a sense that the whole of the work’s history belongs to DalŠ½, from the point of view of his philosophical research, that most of it came from a more or less intellectual point of view”[1].
In the most acute sense, then, the exhibition represents a critical departure from the “realistic” approach of the German aesthetic school, as applied by other art theorists such as Hans-Hans Hermann-Ludwig Zum Wolk et al. and by the British Romantic painter Charles KĆ¼hn. Although the exhibition is based upon a purely theoretical investigation of the idea of art rather than, as some members of the art theory community believe, a true attempt to explain the evolution and development of art,[2], the work in question ā of all the paintings published by DalŠ½ in the last six years, including a few works that were made after the first half-year of the Exhibition (that has become known as the “Second Second Period” or later). In the view of the artist, DalŠ½’s exhibition shows the rise of the new social class and the emergence of the Third Reich in post-war Germany. This is most notably highlighted in a very small exhibition dedicated to the birth of the Fourth Reich in 1931, that, while not even acknowledging the existence of a Third Reich, presents the story in a positive light. Among other elements at work here too, it is not so much that the whole of the Second Period was a pre-scientific or post-scientific development, but that in it, which has been called the Third Reich in German, this concept is given an almost supernatural impetus.
For some time the idea that art is the result of a system of ideas which are the product of specific stages of human evolution or history has been largely put forward by artists and other theorists. In fact, most of the paintings, not even the ones in DalŠ½’s exhibition, date back to the First Second Period,[3] from about the time of Julius II and Friedrich