Get Details of Two of Salvador Dalí Art

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Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 - Figueras, Catalonia, Spain. He is among the most prolific and versatile artists of the twentieth century. The famous Surrealist is chiefly remembered for his painterly output, though in the course of his long career he successfully turned to printmaking, sculpture, fashion, writing, advertising, and filmmaking. He made filmmaking collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dalí was renowned for his role of mischievous provocateur flamboyant personality as much as for his undeniable technical skill. His work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso in his early use of organic morphology. His paintings also declare a fascination he had for Classical and Renaissance art.

Below are few of his painted art works:

Un Chien Andalou (1927)

Dalí had acquired an art education at the age of 24, Picasso has inspired him to practice his own interpretation of Cubism, and was beginning to use the concepts of Surrealist in his paintings. It was at this point, he wanted to create something truly new, and thus, he joined film director Luis Buñuel. They created a film that radically shifted from narrative tradition with its dream logic, lack of plot, non-sequential scenes, and the nod to a Freudian free association.

An ethereal setting is created in Un Chien Andalou in which images are presented in montaged clips. It is created in order to shake reality and tap the unconscious, shocking the viewer awake.

Great Masturbator (1929)

A large distorted human face looking down upon a landscape is a central to the piece is. A reminiscent of Dalí's home in Catalonia is a familiar rocky shoreline scene. A representation of Dalí's new-at-the-time muse Gala rises from a nude female figure, the head, symbolic of the type of fantasy a man would crave while engaging in the practice suggested by the title. An impending fellatio is suggested with her mouth near a male's crotch. In the painting, there are other motifs that include a grasshopper – a regular beacon for sexual anxiety in Dalí's work, ants - elusion to decay and death, and an egg - representing fertility.

Dali’s severely conflicted attitude towards sexual intercourse is represented in the painting and right at the cross-section of the meeting, his lifelong phobia of female genitalia. As a young boy, Dalí's was exposed to a book of explicit photos by his father demonstrating the horrific effects of venereal disease, continuous traumatic associations of sex with morbidity and rot in his mind. Dalí would tout chastity as a door to spirituality in his later life when Salvador Dali paintings turned to religious and philosophical themes.