Salvador Dali and Surrealism

Salvador Dali had quite a public personality with his rebellious attitude and audacity towards
politics and art, and a sense of matching wild art, thus acting as helping elements to see him rise
as a high surrealist and aiding him in creating some of the famous paintings of the twentieth
century. He was highly memorable in the regard because of being a pioneer of the Surrealist
movement. He had the time of applying surrealist concepts to everything he did and said.
Dali’s first period of surrealism was in 1929. He made a set of oil paintings as collages from his
dream images. These works have a highly meticulous point of classical technique that was
influenced by the Renaissance artist and he created the paintings with unreal hallucinatory
characters.
His major contribution to Surrealism was known as the ‘paranoiac-critical method’, which was a
mental exercise to access the subconscious mind to enrich the artistic creativity. Dali used this
method by creating a realty from his subconscious thoughts and dreams and eventually changing
the reality mentally to what he wanted it to be rather than for what it was to be. It became a way
of life for him.

By the 1930s, Dali was subsequently a notorious figure in the movement of Surrealism. His first
patrons were Viscountess and Viscount Charles, and Marie Laure de Noailles. His one of the
most well-known paintings around the time was The Persistance of Memory in 1931. This
painting was also called Soft watches and showed the imagery of a landscape setting with
melting pocket watches, that is said to convey several ideas including that everything is
destructible, and that time isn’t rigid.
Eventually, there was a clash between Dali and the Surrealist movement members. Thus in 1934,
with a trial, he was expelled from the group. Officially he was notified that he was expelled due
to continuous anti-revolutionary activities. And it was also said that some of the members were
aghast at the public antics of his and there were other possible reasons too for his expulsion.
Despite the expulsion of Dali from the Surrealist movement, he continued his participation in
several international exhibitions for Surrealism. In 1936, He delivered a lecture at the London
surrealist exhibition. This lecture was named ‘Fantomes paranoiaques athentiques’ translated as
Authentic paranoid ghosts.

He not only left a mark on surrealism but also his influences and artworks can be seen all over
the world still, even after twenty years following his dismissal.