Salvador Dali Research Paper

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Salvador Dali was born May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain. Being named after an older brother who died of gastroenteritis and the thought that he was the reincarnation, is thought to be a big part of what shaped his culture. In the early 1920s the surrealist movement was formed and Dali followed. Surrealism is known for having a mix of reality and dreams, meanwhile, the paintings are comparable to a photograph. Dali’s paintings were known for the dream state, landscapes, and color. His most notorious painting is The Persistence of Memory finished in 1931. Dali is portraying in The Persistence of Memory that time does end in a sense that we lose track of time.
With Dali’s high quality drawings, he had support of art with both parents, “upon recognizing his immense talent, Salvador Dalí's parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916” (Biography.com, para. 6). School life wasn’t for Salvador Dali, though, and most schooling was not taken seriously. In 1919, at the municipal theatre, he has his first exhibition of his work. Late …show more content…

The meaning behind The Persistence of Memory can vary depending on how you view time and also just what you know about Dali. Time is the main theme of the painting while it’s implied that through shapes of the clocks and that ants that it’s the loss of time. Three clocks are melting and warping to no longer a visible clock. While the fourth clock shows decay by the ants (common in his works of art) swarming as if the clock and time were edible and it would just disappear. The animal dead center is also in reference to him according to MoMA, his paranoiac-critical method made the figure metamorphous. According to “Salvador Dali and Surrealism” it was a trait used by surrealist to “used to merge human, vegetal, and animal forms into a single unit” (Art Beyond Sight, para.

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