Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Essay

Salvador Dali was one of the few artists to become famous whilst still living. He is mostly known for his surrealist style paintings, the most infamous piece being an oil painting named ‘The Persistence of Memory’, which was painted in 1931 and now lives at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Dali was born in 1904 in Catalunyna, Spain. He began painting at a young age and had his first public exhibition in a group show when he was 15 years old.
Dali went through many phases with his art, after Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting; he joined the Surrealist movement in 1929. These Surrealists believed that the world of the subconscious mind has a reality superior to the natural world we live in.
He developed a method he named ‘paranoiac critical’, where he would induce hallucinatory states in his mind, to bring up images from his subconscious. It was this method that made his painting style mature rapidly and made him the world’s mo...