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salvador dali
Considered one of the most important painters of the 20th century. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his surrealist work. He was influenced greatly by the Renaissance masters and his artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture and photography.
Born in Catalonia, Spain, Dalí insisted on his “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in 711, and attributed to these origins, “my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes.”
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life. Some trends in Dalí’s work that would continue throughout his life were already evident very early on, however. Dalí devoured influences of all styles of art he could find and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting edge avant garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, the work introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, suggestive of Einstein’s theory that time is relative and not fixed. A sense that is also supported by other images in the work, for instance the ants and fly which are devouring the other watches.
Dalí was a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache. When signing autographs for fans, Dalí would always keep their pens. When later interviewed on the Sixty Minutes television show, Dalí kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled interviewer matter-of factly that “Dalí is immortal and will not die”.
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