Salvador Dali

The Executioner of Surrealism

It would be wrong to say that Salvador Dali was an influential artist for that would imply that he inspired others to either follow in his footsteps or further evolve his ideas. In truth, he was hated by most artists of his generation, and they wanted nothing to do with him or his ideas.

Not only did Dali alienate himself from other artists, he arguably killed the growth of Surrealism by setting a benchmark that no other Surrealist artist could hope to surpass, or even be compared to. Because of Dali, if a young artist held ambitions to be recognised as a genius, it was a medium other than Surrealism where they had to ply their trade. In short, Dali showed the genius of Surrealism in a way that made it extremely popular for audiences, but a challenge too high for most other artists.

Perhaps for good reason, Dali was a man with a huge ego and this placed him in conflict with all those around him. For example, when studying at School of Fine Arts in Madrid, the class was instructed to copy a statue of the Virgin Mary. Dali responded by drawing a pair of scales. He then stated to his teacher, "perhaps you see a Virgin, but I see a pair of scales." Later, Dali was expelled refusing to be assessed by his teachers, who he deemed to be intellectually inferior.

Dali had a passionate interest in the old masters, from whom he gained his formidable painting skills, but he was also a huge admirer of Picasso's abstraction. In 1928, he moved to Paris and discovered Surrealism, which he also referred to as his hand-painted-dream-photographs. Most of Dali’s imagery seemed to be drawn from his recollections of his vivid childhood. Unlike some artists, he was never prone to explain his work and allowed his audience to form their own interpretations.

In 1929, he organised his first solo show, and accompanied it with film that included a close up of a woman's eyeball being sliced by a razor and a man struggling at the end of a rope tied to two grand pianos. It was a show that announced himself to the Surrealists as their man of the hour.

Although Dali was initially a Surrealist hero, with time he starting publicly stating his belief that his theories, his ideas and his painting skills were superior to other Surrealist artists. He also stated that his mission was "rescue art from the formless ugliness of modernism."

Much of Dali’s faith in himself was justified. Arguably, the next best Surrealist was Rene Margritte; however, comparing the two would be like comparing Photoshop1 to Photoshop10.  Margritte could paint realistic imagery and then mentally cut and past it into other scenes in order to induce the psychological reflection. Dali was far more advanced. He could imagine the scenes, liquidly them, fuse them, apply gradients, change the textual surfaces and reconstitute everything into a dreamlike whole. Dali’s vastly superior conceptual skills gave him an ability to liberate his subconscious with a freedom that Margritte and other Surrealists simply didn’t have. The pioneers of the movement had been surpassed and embarrassed just when they were their baby footsteps.

Dali’s ego (or perhaps more accurately, the damaged ego of other Surrealists) resulted in him being expelled from the Surrealist group in 1934. It didn't matter though. Dali’s genius was obvious and he didn’t need the glowing recommendations of the Surrealist group for art buyers to be able to identify it.  As Dali's fortune grew, the leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, christened him " avida dollars", in order to imply that Dali was interested in money but not art itself. The insult was just another sign of Breton's damaged ego and his jealousy. The more fame that Dali attained, the more bitter former friends became.

As well as gaining notoriety for the genius of his work, Dali also gained notoriety for his odd behaviour. He was prone to fits of hysterical laughter and once gave a lecture in a knights' metal armour with his foot standing in a bucket of milk. Some art historians have proposed Dali's behaviour was all a marketing act. They argued that because Surrealist ideology believed that the insane were divinely inspired, by acting insane, and declaring such things as "the only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad", Dali was able to further enhance his pre-eminence. However, claims that his eccentric behaviour was a marketing act would necessitate that Dali had a perception of his rational self-interest, which he did not. While his behaviour got him attention, it also got him expelled from the art academy, annoyed and embarrassed the buyers of his art, alienated him from other artists and elicited hostile press from critics. Besides which, his art was so good that it didn't need any special promotion. As much as someone can be mad, Dali was mad. His distorted dreams of reality were not just expressed on the canvas, but also expressed in his daily life.

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomised by Her Own Chastity - (1954)

Persistence of Memory - (1931)