Salvador Dali

Portrait of my Dead Brother, 1963 

Dali was given the same name as a brother who died at the age of 21 months, nine months before Salvador’s birth. He was also given his dead brother’s clothes and toys. As a child, this made Dali obsessed with proving his own existence. He would often visit the grave that bore his own name. This seemed to have an adverse effect on Dali for the duration of his life.

“Throughout the whole of my childhood and youth I lived with the perception that I was a part of my dead brother. That is, in my body and my soul, I carried the clinging carcass of this dead brother because my parents were constantly speaking about the other Salvador.”

Chiaroscuro is originally an Italian artistic technique meaning light (chiaro) and dark (scuro). This style was highly developed by Renaissance painters.

The gradations of light and dark values in two-dimensional imagery; the illusion of rounded, three-dimensional form is created through lighting and shading, rather than a rough line.

Dali employed the use of this technique throught his life; most notably during his religious period.

The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1946 Picasso said during this period that Dali was: “…the only Renaissance painter left in the world.”

Christ of Saint John of the Cross, 1951 The perspective of Christ himself is based on the Renaissance Law of Divine Proportion.

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954 Dali defines this painting as “a sensational picture, an explosive, nuclear and hypercubic Christ, a metaphysical work…”

The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955 Symbolic geometric elements are apparent in this painting. Behind Christ is a dodecahedron- an element formed by 12 pentagonal faces- which relates to the number of apostles. The open-armed Christ in the background could be a reference to the Resurrection.

“My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision…”
“Paranoiac critical activity organizes and objectifies in a exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of the subjective and objective ’significance’ in the irrational.”
- Salvador Dali; quote from “La conquete de l’irrational,” 1935

Surrealism is a cultural, social and political movement, according to Andre Breton , that was developed by 20th century writers and artists. Surrealists believe that liberation of the human mind and subsequent liberation of society and the individual can be achieved by exercising the imaginative abilities of the “unconscious mind.” The objective is to the attain a dream-like state different from, or ultimately “truer” than everyday reality. Surrealists trust that this more truthful reality can bring about personal, cultural and social revolution, and a life of freedom, poetry and uninhibited sexuality.

Read more about Surrealist Techniques .