Re-posting on SURREALISM

Surrealism, strategically at this point in my life, has fascinated me. In order to understand this style of art making, I decided to visit the Salvador Dali Museum back in 2001.

That museum is located in Saint Petersburg - USA, the city where I used to live in the USA. The Salvador Dali Museum is a fantastic place that everyone must visit. It has the world largest permanent collection of Dali’s paintings. It helps us understand how the surrealists depicted things from the artist personal life, historical facts or everyday situations and their connection with psychoanalysis studies.

Surrealism is an important movement in modern art and literature, which started between the wars, mainly in France. The idea was to free the artist from the demands of logic and to penetrate beyond everyday consciousness to the “super-reality” that lies behind. Dali was not alone in this movement. Magritte and Tanguy are also famous painters who used the distorted way to register the reality.

Surrealist artists wanted their work to be a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real forms of the material world. To them, the object stood as a metaphor for an inner reality. Through their craft, whether it be painting, sculpting or drawing, artists could bring the inner realities of the subconscious to the conscious mind, so that their meaning could be deciphered through analysis.

Salvador Dali was born at Figueras in Spain. He studied in Madrid and moved to Paris later, where he joined the surrealists and became one of the principal figures of the movement. In 1940 he settled in the USA with his wife Gala, and devoted his art to symbolic religious paintings. Dali became also a wealthy man through commercial works in design and advertisement fields.

My visit at the Salvador Dali Museum made me realize how connected Freud’s theories and his paintings are. However, Dali experienced different genres and perspectives in his works, from impressionist to classical surrealist . The galleries of the museum are divided by these genres (or art periods): “portraite”, “landscape painting”, “the figure”, “still life”, “the grotesque”, and his huge “masterworks” – also known as the classic period.

The division in his works in these six categories allows us to visualize the full development and diversity of Dali’s creativity from 1914(age 10) to 1980.

His classic phase impressed me the most. It is located in time from 1948 to 1970. During this period, he executed eighteen large oil canvases that are now called the “masterworks”. Some of the titles are “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”, “The Ecumenical Council”, and “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”. Dali became more interested in religion, history and modern science during that time. Diego Velazquez and Raphael had influenced him mainly.

As an artist, Dali was complete. He painted, sculpted, designed jewelry, clothes, accessories, furniture, and turned himself into an icon. He made his living with his inspiring artwork. He became famous when still alive. Salvador symbolizes the surrealist movement. His contribution to the modern visual arts is infinite.

Visiting the Salvador Dali Museum I could verify his excellence as a creative (almost crazy) painter that will influence art genres of artists still to come.

My personal impression about surrealism:>

Don't know yet whether I am influenced by this style. What I know so far is that artists such as Magritte and Dali have encountered power and madness through their strokes on their canvases that can modify people's deep concepts of life and the world. The thing is that I deal with language and I haven't learned how to give to it a surreal feature.


I haven't been able to declare to everyone that that style is the only possible way of art making so that he/she may make a fully Surrealist use of it. To the extent that I am expected to make me understood, I try to offer in my writings an ability to the reader for speaking my poetry, as he/she would be reading a letter, or providing him/her written images to carry on a conversation (for the pleasure of conversing) with someone (with me)... Something like it.

LONG LIVE SURREALISM!!!