Salvador Dali

Spanish artist, a leading exponent of Surrealism. A Catalan by birth, Dalí received an academic training in Madrid (1922–6), although some of his early work is in fact Cubist in style. After moving to Paris in 1929, he joined the Surrealists, who were immediately influenced by his meticulously executed dreamlike paintings, which he himself described as the ‘hand-coloured photographs’ of his delirium. He also collaborated with Luis Buñuel (1900–83) on the films Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'or (1930). During the 1930s his principal innovation was the development of ‘paranoia-criticism’, which he defined as a form of ‘irrational understanding based on the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena’. This was inspired by the systematic quality of certain kinds of neurosis, in which a complex series of illogical associations can be made on the basis of a single obsessive belief. In pictorial terms this led to bizarre juxtapositions of rationally unconnected objects, and to multiple images, where a single form could be interpreted as representing more than one subject. Despite their initial approval, the Surrealists repudiated Dalí in the late 1930s, on account of his right-wing views and increasing commercial success. After spending eight years in the USA, Dalí returned in 1948 to Europe, where he continued to produce spectacular fantasy paintings. Dalí was also a prolific writer: as well as producing a novel Hidden Faces (1944), he vividly described his artistic goals in such works as The Conquest of the Irrational (1935) and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

Masters, Christopher. "Dalí, Salvador." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e675 (accessed April 16, 2012).