Salvador Dalí: Surrealism and Dreams

 Salvador Dalí

By: Olivia Freiberg

    I first encountered Salvador Dalí in one of my middle school art classes. I was baffled by figures that he drew and painted and the warped way in which he represented the world. I first saw one of his pieces in person when I went to the Art Institute and saw "Inventions of the Monsters", which had a giraffe that seemed to be on fire and several different women that were represented in different states of undress. I remember the unsettling feeling I had when looking at the piece and the sense of wonder it inspired to derive its meaning.

    Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary. Dalí's father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Dalí in his art and early eccentricities. He did have an older brother, who's death impacted his view of his relationality to the world. Later in his life, Dalí often told the story that when he was 5 years old, his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother's reincarnation. In the metaphysical way of speaking he frequently used, Dalí recalled, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute."

    Dalí, along with his younger sister Ana Maria and his parents, often spent time at their summer home in the coastal village of Cadaques. At an early age, Dalí was producing highly sophisticated drawings, and both of his parents strongly supported his artistic talent. It was here that his parents built him an art studio before he entered art school. Upon recognizing his immense talent, Dalí's parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream in class and stand out as the class eccentric, wearing odd clothing and long hair.

 

    As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. 

    In terms of his creative process in bringing up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.” Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena". Employing the method when creating a work of art uses an active process of the mind to visualize images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image that can be interpreted in different ways.

    Salvador Dalí was fascinated by images that appeared to him between states of sleep and wakefulness. These images proved to be extremely vivid, colorful, and bizarre. One of his most leveraged techniques for capturing these images is what he referred to as “slumber with a key.” This tactic required a very brief nap—less than a second long—and was used to channel the fluid space between wakefulness and sleep.

     During the momentary state of sleep, sensations and perceptions of the day would return as dreamlike images. He would often encourage others to try the method, claiming it brought visual inspiration and necessary rest. Aside from the hypnagogic nap he used to spark subconscious creative thoughts, there are a plethora of ways to gain creative inspiration from the artist and his habits.

        A major example of this method would be in his work, the "Hallucinogenic Toreador" that Dalí created in the late 1960s. Dalí conceived this painting while in an art supply store in 1968. In the body of Venus, on a box of Venus pencils, he saw the face of the toreador. This double image painting repeats the image of the "Venus de Milo" several times in such a way that the shadows form the features. Start with the green skirt, and make it into a man's necktie. The white skirt becomes his shirt. Travel up the figure. Her abdomen becomes his chin, her waist is his mouth, and her left breast is the nose. The pink arch forms the top of the head with the arena at the top as his hat. The tear in the eye (at the bottom of Venus' neck) is shed for the bull. The red skirt on the right Venus is his red cape. Dalí made this painting to relay his dissatisfaction with the tradition of bull-fighting, something that had been a historical tradition in Spain and brutally killed several hundred bulls per year.

    In terms of how Dalí relates to Fuentes' novel "A Creative Spark", I feel that he is an example of the primal creativity that Fuentes believes all of us possess. Humankind was required to come up with creative solutions to survive and it is a unique aspect of our psyche. While we all maintain this "spark", certain individuals are more "in tune" with this unique trait and can use it to create works of art that expand on known reality in a unique way. Dalí does this within his pieces and is extremely in touch of the creativity that spurs from his subconscious. 

    Dalí is a great example of a middle C creative, as he is part of a larger "Paris Surrealist" movement but utilizes that style to create extremely distinct pieces of art from his style. I think that he also an example of a creative that utilizes intrinsic inspiration and relies on the hallucinogenic states that he produces from his own mind for creative influence. I feel as though he acts as a conduit of creativity itself and does not rely on outward perspectives to control his commentary and understanding of the world around him in his art.