David and Art - The Surrealist and the Celebrity

My daughter recently had the opportunity to go to Spain, and while she was there, her group went to the Salvador Dali Museum town of Figueres. She really liked it and sent me a host of great pictures while she was there. Looking at his work got me reflecting on the artist himself.

Salvador Dali is one of the central artists of the 20th century, but his overall career is a little bit hard to measure. For at least half his life he was more famous as a celebrity than a painter.

He was born in there Figueres in 1904. It was evident before he was ten that he was a naturally skilled artist. He was only 14 when some of his drawings and paintings were first exhibited there in his hometown. At age 17, which would have been in 1921, he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He didn’t graduate largely because of tensions he enflamed with the faculty.

As a young painter he became interested in the modern art movement of cubism and from there drifted into the circle of surrealists. Surrealists basically believed that dreams and the subconscious were a better grounding for art than rational thought. At least in part because they believed that art spoke to humans from some other place than from reason.

He finished the painting that’s probably his best-known work in 1931. It’s called The Persistence of Memory, and you may know it more by its melting watch faces.

By 1933 he was having solo exhibits in Paris and New York City. In 1936 he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In 1940 went to the United States. From that point he started to become more known for his behavior and self-promotion than for his art.

He returned to Spain in 1948 but continued to spend lots of the year in New York, bathing in its attention and the money it brought him. He was a guest on shows from Ed Sullivan to Johnny Carson to Merv Griffin. He made a TV commercial for Braniff Airlines in 1967 alongside New York Yankees pitching legend Whitey Ford. In 1974 his hometown opened a museum of his work. He died in 1989 and is buried at the museum

A critic in the UK newspaper, The Guardian, recently noted that “the avant-garde in the modern age has two choices: either it is for a wealthy elite, or it is for the masses. Dalí is accused, with some justice, of everything from snobbery to fascism, but the paradox is that he made modern art popular and accessible.”

Let’s talk more about art and celebrity next week.

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