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DALÍ
- 2. Hechos importantes • Nació en el año 1904 y murió en el año 1989. • Su estilo más notable era el surrealismo. • Trató de captar los sueños en su arte. • Le influyó mucho el psicoanálisis de Freud. • Penetró la subconsciencia para unirla con la realidad externa para crear una superrealidad.
- 3. Hechos importantes • Mucho de su arte está basado en las memorias de su niñez. • Se ve frecuentemente las muletas, los frijoles, y los huevos. • Tenía miedo de los saltamontes (grasshoppers)
- 4. La Persistencia De La Memoria
- 5. Battle over a dandelion
- 13. Night and Day Clothes, 1936
- 15. Visión de la guerra
- 18. Marilyn Monroe
- 19. Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger
- 20. Meditative Rose
- 22. Portrait of Gala
- 23. Red Orchestra
- 24. Rock ‘n Roll
- 25. The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory
- 26. Galatea of the Spheres
- 28. The Temptation of Saint Anthony
- 29. Design for "Destino", 1947
- 30. Portrait of Picasso, 1947
- 31. The Three Sphinxes of Bikini, 1947
- 32. Four Armchairs in the Sky, 1949
- 33. The Eye, 1945
- 35. Decor for "Romeo et Juliet", 1942
- 36. The Flames, They Call, 1942
- 37. Untitled - for the campaign against venereal disease, 1942
- 38. Baby Map of the World, 1939
- 39. Sleep, 1937
- 41. Woman with a Head of Roses, 1935
- 43. Ant Face
- 45. Two Pieces of Bread, Expressing the Sentiment of Love, 1940
- 47. Metamorphosis of Narcissus, circa 1937
- 48. The Enigma of Hitler, circa 1939
- 49. Freud’s Perverse Polymorph (Bulgarian Child Eating a Rat), 1939
- 50. Giant Flying Demi-Tasse with Incomprehensibl e Appendage Five Meters Long, circa 1944- 45
- 51. The Last Supper
- 52. Tuna Fishing
- 53. St. George and the Dragon
- 54. Bed, Chair and Bedside Table Ferociously Attacking a Cello
- 55. La Fertilidad
- 56. El Bigote de Dalí
- 57. Dalí Desnudo
- 62. La Infanta
- 63. Man with His Head Full of Clouds
- 64. Man with Unhealthy Complexion Listening to the Sound of the Sea
- 66. Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was the Grasshopper Child
- 73. William Tell
Editor's Notes
- This is perhaps the most famous of all of Dali’S paintings.
- The Horseman of Death, 1935 The Horseman of Death shares images from several of Dalí's works dating from this time. The rainbow set against dense clouds is an image that Dalí also used in Le Spectre et le Fantome . Dalí interpreted this combined image as a representation of the spectre from the title of the painting. The tower in the background can also be seen in several other paintings, such as The Dream Approaches . Dalí explained that the significance of this tower was a sexual one, as it was an image that formed the background to many of his long, erotic daydreams. A dense cluster of cypress trees hides the tower from our view. The cypress tree is also a familiar image in Dalí's paintings of the early to mid Thirties, their significance, once again, having roots in Dalí's childhood memories. The horseman itself is a frequent image, although here he is in a state of disintegration, parts of his horse still has flesh remaining, while the horseman is purely skeleton. Dalí wrote of this piece that it reminded him, with a sense of deja vu, of the interior of the Island of the Dead by Bocklin.
- Paranoiac-Critical Solitude, 1935 During 1935 and 1936, Dalí's repetition and use of elements which are completely out of place is remarkable. Here the desired effect is obtained with the maximum of force, and the minimum of means. Dalí has taken a small piece of desolate landscape with some rocks. Into his decor, he has placed an automobile, or rather a wreck of an automobile - like those of Hibert-Robert - overgrown and half-covered with flowering plants, and then has incorporated the machine into the rocky crags, through which a hole has been pierced. Next, in a paranoiac manner, he has divided the image in two by repeating it on the left part of the rock while scrupulously re-creating the silhouette of the vehicle, impressed in the hollow of the rock, of which a piece, cut out in the same shape as the hole on the right, appears suspended in front. The optical uneasiness of this picture stems from the contradiction which exists between the piece of rock on the left in relief and the empty space in the rock on the right, which itself seems clearly in front of the car. Here in Dalí's research into dividing, one realizes how the stereoscopic phenomenon has always interested him in a continuos way, because it is definitely a question of the stereoscopic effect applied to the problem of the dream in colors and relief. In this work, it is also possible to understand the desire of the painter who is always looking for examples in natural phenomena to explain certain scientific laws, affirming that one day we will undoubtedly find in geology traces of holograms, while today that possibility remains quite out of the question in the minds of the specialists. Paranoiac-Critical Solitude was painted on olive wood in Port Lligat.
- The Triangular Hour, 1933 The Triangular Hour was painted using oil on canvas. After their first appearance in The Persistence of Memory (1933), Dalí's "soft watches" were to become a regular image throughout his work. The watch in The Triangular Hour differs from other "soft watches" in that it has no metal casing. In addition it appears to be actually made from stone; it has a crack across its face that is similar to the cracks in the rock that it is placed on. It also does not appear as melted, as "soft", as other watches seen in earlier paintings; here it is merely misshapen. The watch is mounted on a rock formation as if hung on a kitchen wall. Underneath is a hole in the rock through which we see an Ampordan plain, where the figure of a child with a hoop can be seen. At the top of the rock formation is the bust of a Classical man, his face in a grimace. Dalí has placed rocks on top of the bust, as well as on top of the rock formation and on the other rock in the shadowy foreground. One interpretation of this painting is that Dalí is viewing mankind and time as governed by the solidity of nature.
- Night and Day Clothes, 1936 Here is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing of the innumerable illustrations, pen or pencil drawings, gouaches, or watercolors produced by Dalí before World War II for the most glamorous fashion magazines. This one was done during the winter of 1936 while Dalí and Gala were spending a few days at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Dalí thinks he remembers that it was probably destined for Harper's Bazaar or Vogue . For him, the interesting part of this creation stems from the idea that he imagined during winter sports, with snow plainly visible, an outfit that suggests sun baths, since one can easily discover four openings by rolling up a sort of shade in order to expose the body. Most of the costumes created by Dalí possess an obvious erotic power. Here, we don't know at exactly what moment the outfit becomes skin, covering, coat - indeed even a closet, cupboard, or a window - since this tunic-dress has a front zipper and can at the same time be opened wide by turning the cremone bolt which is pictured on it. Dalí has always liked to associate with society people and dress designers. In a taped interview, summarized later in his Le Journal d'un genie , he told me apropos of his snobbism: "During the Surrealist period, it was a regular strategy. Besides Rene Crevel, I was the only one who associated with society people and who was accepted by them; the other Surrealists did not know this set, and were not admitted there. In front of them I could always get up quickly and say, 'I am going to a dinner party in town,' letting them imagine or speculate with whom - they would find this out the next day, and it was even better that they should learn this from intermediaries, that it had been a dinner at the Prince Faucigny Lucinge's home or at the house of people whom they looked upon as forbidden fruit since they were not received by them. Immediately afterwards, when I arrived at the houses of the society people, I practiced another type of snobbism which was much more acute; I used to say, 'I must leave very early right after the coffee, to see the Surrealist group,' which I described to them as a group that was much more difficult to enter than the aristocracy or any of the people they knew, because the Surrealists sent me insulting letters and found the society people to be 'ass-heads' who knew absolutely nothing... Snobbism consists of always being able to penetrate into places to which others have no access; this gives the others an awful feeling of inferiority... I must add something else: I was incapable of keeping up with all the gossip about everyone and I never knew who had quarreled with whom. Like the comedian Harry Langdon, I always appeared in places where I should not have gone... But I myself, Dalí, imperturbable, I used to go to the Beaumonts, then I would pay a visit to the Lopezes without knowing anything about their quarrels, or, if I did know about it, I didn't pay the least attention to it; it was the same way with Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, who had a real civil war going in the fashion world. I used to eat lunch with the former, take tea with the latter, and in the evening dine with the first one; all this caused great waves of jealousy. I am one of those rare people who have lived in the most paradoxical circles, those most impenetrable to each other, who go in and out of them at will. I did it out of pure snobbism, that is to say because of a frenetic desire to be constantly seen in all the most inaccessible sets." Later, the painter was to say in the course of an interview: "The constant tragedy of human life is fashion, and that is why I have always liked to collaborate with Mlle Chanel and Mme Schiaparelli, just to prove that the idea of dressing oneself, the idea of disguising oneself, was only the consequence of the traumatic experience of birth, which is the strongest of all the traumas that a human being can experience, since it is the first. Fashion is also the tragic constant of history; through it you always see war coming while watching its fashion reviews and its parades of mannequins who themselves are veritable exterminating angels."
- The Visage of War, 1940 "The two most energetic motors that make the artistic and superfine brain of Salvador Dalí function are, first, libido, or the sexual instinct, and, second, the anguish of death," affirms the painter; "not a single minute of my like passes without the sublime Catholic, apostolic, and Roman specter of death accompanying me even in the least important of my most subtle and capricious fantasies." This painting was done in California at the end of the year 1940; the horrible face of war, its eyes filled with infinite death, was much more a reminiscence of the Spanish Civil Was than of the Second World War, which, at the time, had not yet provided a cortege of frightful images capable of impressing Dalí. He himself wrote in The Secret Life : "I was entering a period of rigor and asceticism which was going to dominate my style, my thoughts, and my tormented life. Spain in fire would light up this drama of the renaissance of aesthetics. Spain would serve as a holocaust to that post-war Europe tortured by ideological dramas, by moral and artistic anxieties... At one fell swoop, from the middle of the Spanish cadaver, springs up, half-devoured by vermin and ideological worms, the Iberian penis in erection, huge like a cathedral filled with the white dynamite of hatred. Bury and Unbury! Disinter and Inter! In order to unbury again! Such was the charnel desire of the Civil War in that impatient Spain. One would see how she was capable of suffering; of making others suffer, of burying and unburying, of killing and resurrecting. It was necessary to scratch the earth to exhume tradition and to profane everything in order to be dazzled anew by all the treasures that the land was hiding in its entrails." The horror of this picture is further increased by the brown tonalities which dominate its atmosphere. On the anecdotal sire, Dalí has stressed that it was the only work where one could see the true imprint of his hand on the canvas (at the lower right).
- This is perhaps the most famous of all of Dali’S paintings.
- Dali sometimes gives very large names to his slides.
- Meditative Rose, 1958 Roses appear in many of Dalí's works; in the Thirties he made several paintings of women whose heads were formed by roses. Dalí uses the rose as a female sexual symbol. The Invisible Man (1929—32) includes two partially naked women with huge roses appearing where their wombs should be. In 1930, Dalí used this image again but in a more definitive way, depicting a nude woman with bleeding roses coming from her womb. To Dalí then, the rose represented menstruation and the internal reproductive organs of women. The Rose shares a similar structure with the Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms (1954). Both paintings have the familiar intensely blue sky as a backdrop to a dominating central image that hovers over a Spanish landscape. The paintings also share the same vivid red color of the rose, which contrasts so effectively with the blue sky; in Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms , the red is used for the border beneath her head. In The Rose , there is a tiny drop of water on one of the petals of the flower, as realistic as a photograph. Dalí often used this effect of trompe l'oeil to highlight a small detail of a painting.
- This painting is one of a series of seven that Dalí painted for his friend Billy Rose, to replace a 1944 series Dalí had painted for him called The Seven Lively Arts , which were destroyed in a fire at Billy's home. The Dance is a visual interpretation of rock and roll. In the previous series, this picture had been called Boogie-Woogie after the current dance and music scene of that name. 1956 was the year in which Dalí launched his own perfume, which was also called Rock "n" Roll. Dalí explained the allure of Rock "n" Roll saying "I love anything that is dionysic, violent and aphrodisiac". In The Dance he has represented all three of these qualities. The naked figures are deformed, with their bodies twisted out of shape through the energy of their dance. They are pulling each other apart; the hand of the man is squeezing the neck of the woman, another hand (he has three) stretches her arm. The picture is a further exploration of the sexual cannibalism theme portrayed in Autumnal Cannibalism (1936); the idea of love being devouring.
- This painting can be considered as a companion piece to another work that Dalí had done many years before, namely The Persistence of Memory in which Dalí initially created the scene on which this painting is based. The ochre colored plain of the ground, has been divided up into cubic shaped blocks, and the addition of the rhinoceros horns in the upper left-hand portion of the painting also refers to Dalí's fascination with the molecular world. The melting watches and landscape of Cadaqués make another appearance herein, and the addition of the fish serves as a witness to the event. Dalí created this painting as a continuation of his themes of Nuclear Mysticism by applying a perspective of Divisionism to the original painting. Dalí painted this work to explore the effects of nuclear weaponry, asserting that the invention of such weaponry had a profound effect upon everyone on the planet, even those in the small fishing villages along the coastline of Spain.
- Raphaelesque Head Exploding, 1951 This is yet another work in which Dalí combines imagery and references to many different facets of his life into a whole. Dalí's Classical fascination with the atomic structure, a return to the influences of the Renaissance, and his religious background all come together in this remarkable work. Dalí's interest in perfect forms led him to idolize the rhinoceros horns which can be seen floating above the figure's left eyebrow. These horns represent Dalí's conviction that the basis of life itself was indeed a spiral. The Madonna face here is depicted in a state of nuclear fragmentation, thus further illustrating Dalí's point. The crown of the head seems to be made up of a vaulted ceiling, certainly a reference to Dalí's love of all things classical, and perhaps to the ruins of Ampurius near his childhood home.
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1946 In this picture temptation appears to Saint Anthony successively in the form of a horse in the foreground representing strength, sometimes also the symbol of voluptuousness, and in the form of the elephant which follows it, carrying on its back the golden cup of lust in which a nude woman is standing precariously balanced on the fragile pedestal, a figure which emphasizes the erotic character of the composition. The other elephants are carrying buildings on their backs; the first of these is an obelisk inspired by that of Bernini in Rome, the second and third are burdened with Venetian edifices in the style of Palladio. In the background another elephant carries a tall tower which is not without phallic overtones, and in the clouds one can glimpse a few fragments of Escorial, symbol of temporal and spiritual order. The elephant theme appears several times in Dalí's works of this period: for example, in Atomica Melancholica of 1945 and Triumph of Dionysus of 1953. This picture was painted in the studio that the artist occupied for a few days next to the Colony Restaurant in New York. It is the first and only time that he participated in a contest. It was an invitational artistic competition for a painting on the theme of the temptation of Saint Anthony, organized in 1946 by the Loew Lewin Company, a movie-producing firm. The winning picture was to figure in a film taken from the story "Bel Ami" by Maupassant. Eleven painters took part in the competition, among them Leonora Carrington, Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning. The prize was given to Max Ernst by a jury composed of Alfred Barr, Marcel Duchamp, and Sidney Janis. All these works were shown at an exhibition in Brussels and in Rome during 1947.
- Portrait of Picasso, 1947 Dalí painted the portrait of his genial compatriot in California. It is interesting to compare it with his own Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon , painted six years earlier in the same place. This portrait might be entitled Official Paranoiac Portrait of Pablo Picasso , because Dalí has assembled here all the folkloric elements that anecdotally depict the origins of the Andalusian painter. His renown is affirmed by his bust mounted on a pedestal, symbol of official consecration; the breasts depict Picasso's nutritious aspect while he carries on his head the heavy rock of the responsibility for the influence of his work on contemporary painting. The face itself is a mixture of a goat hoof and the headdress of the Greco-Iberian marble bust, the Lady of Elche , which brings to mind Andalusian and Malagan origins of Picasso. The Iberian folklore is finished off with a carnation, a jasmine flower, and the guitar. Speaking about the work of this Titan shortly after his death, Dalí said: "I believe that the magic in Picasso's work is romantic, in other words, the root of its upheaval, while mine can only be done by building on tradition. I am totally different from Picasso since he was not interested in beauty, but in ugliness and I, more and more, in beauty; but ugly beauty and beautiful beauty, in extreme cases of geniuses like Picasso and me, can be of an angelic type."
- Design for the film "Spellbound" starring Ingrid Bergman and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945 -
- Raised on its pedestal, this face becomes a fantastic effigy. The rusher of bacon is a reference to culinary tastes in the United States, where Dalí's work enjoyed great success during those years.
- Sleep, 1937 Sleep was painted for Edward James, a British millionaire who was Dalí's patron from 1936 to 1939. Sleep deals with a subject that fascinated the Surrealists: the world of dreams. They believed that the freedom of the subconscious within sleep could be tapped into and then used creatively. Sleep is a visual rendering of the body's collapse into sleep, as if into a separate state of being. Against a deep blue summer sky, a huge disembodied head with eyes dissolved in sleep, hangs suspended over an almost empty landscape. The head is "soft", appearing both vulnerable and distorted; what should be a neck tapers away to drop limply over a crutch. A dog appears, its head in a crutch, as if half asleep itself. The head is propped above the land by a series of wooden crutches. The mouth, nose and also the eyes are all held in place by the crutches, suggesting that the head might disintegrate if they were removed. Crutches were a familiar sight in Dalí's work. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , the artist wrote that he had imagined sleep as a heavy monster that was "held up by the crutches of reality".
- Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937 Swans Reflecting Elephants contains one of Dalí's famous double images. The double images were a major part of Dalí's "paranoia-critical method", which he put forward in his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational". He explained his process as a "spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena". Dalí used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties. As with the earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus , Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In The Metamorphosis of Narcissus the reflection of Narcissus is used to mirror the shape of the hand on the right of the picture. Here, the three swans in front of bleak, leafless trees are reflected in the lake so that the swans' heads become the elephants' heads and the trees become the bodies of the elephants. In the background of the painting is a Catalonian landscape depicted in fiery fall colors, the brushwork creating swirls in the cliffs that surround the lake, to contrast with the cool stillness of the water.
- This beautiful still life, depicting three slices of bread, a few crumbs, and a chess pawn, is a remarkable example of the way in which Dalí succeeds in adding an epic dimension to the most ordinary of everyday things. This picture was painted in Arcachon in the spring of 1940. Dalí has said about the "intervention, from an anecdotal point of view," of Marcel Duchamp in this oil: "Gala and I used to play chess every afternoon, at the same time that I was in the process of painting the slices of bread. I was trying to make the surface on which the rough crumbs of bread were placed very smooth. Often there were things scattered about on the floor for instance, the pawns. One day, instead of putting them all back in the box, one of them remained placed in the middle of the model of my still life. Afterwards we had to find another chess set in order to continue our games, because I was using this one and would not allow anyone to remove it." Pictures of bread occupy an important place in Dalí's work, not only in painting but also in objects, such as Retrospective Bust of a Woman . He himself has explained the presence of bread in his works when writing about one of his paintings of 1945, Basket of Bread , in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Bignou Gallery in New York: "My aim was to retrieve the lost technique of the painters of the past, to succeed in depicting the immobility of the pre-explosive object. Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject nineteen years ago, The Basket of Bread . By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism."
- The Burning Giraffe, 1937 Dalí believed that both The Burning Giraffe and The Invention of Monsters were premonitions of war. Both of these paintings contain the image of a giraffe with its back ablaze, an image which Dalí interpreted as "the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster". He first used this image of the giraffe in flames in his film L'Age d'Or ( The Golden Age ) in 1930. The Burning Giraffe appears as very much a dreamscape, not simply because of the subject but also because of the supernatural aquamarine color of the background. Against this vivid blue color, the flames on the giraffe stand out to great effect. In the foreground, a woman stands with her arms outstretched. Her forearms and face are blood red, having been stripped to show the muscle beneath the flesh. The woman's face is featureless now, indicating a nightmarish helplessness and a loss of individuality. Behind her, a second woman holds aloft a strip of meat, representing death, entrophy, and the human races capacity to devour and destroy. The women both have elongated phallic shapes growing out from their backs, and these are propped up with crutches — Dalí repeatedly uses this symbolism for a weak and flawed society.
- The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937 Dalí's inspiration for this painting came from a conversation overheard between two fishermen discussing a local man who would stare at himself in a mirror for hours. One of the men described the man as having a "bulb in his head"; a colloquium meaning that he was mentally ill. Dalí combined this image with the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and was transformed into the flower that bears his name after his death. The hand on the right that holds an egg, out of which a narcissus flower grows, echoes the configuration of Narcissus and his reflection in the lake. The same configuration occurs again at the top of the mountains that are directly above the figure of Narcissus, who stands on a dais admiring his body. The familiar sight of ants and a scavenging dog both appear around the hand, symbolizing the death and decay that has taken place. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus was painted using oil on canvas, while Dalí and Gala were traveling in Italy. The influence of the great Italian masters on Dalí can be seen in the Classical mythic theme to his use of color and form.
- Unfathomable and distrubing, the secretive character of this picture is based on its paradoxical elements: hard and soft, as expressed through the telephone, umbrella, and boiled beans on the plate. The telephone is similar to shellfish in Dalí's pictorial language; in both cases, a hard shell protects the soft matter of the flesh or the words.
- Giant Flying Demi-Tasse with Incomprehensible Appendage Five Meters Long, circa 1944-1945 In this landscape, because of Dalí's years of exile, the atmosphere and the light of Cadaqués have become indistinct and replaced by lighting that gives an almost abstract and very imaginary character to the rock, "La Rata" (the rat), which rises from the sea off Cape Creus. This composition was painted in New York and California right at the time when Dalí was having exciting conversations with the Rumanian prince Matila Ghyka, professor of aesthetics at the University of Southern California. Dalí had a thorough knowledge of his works, The Geometry of Art and Life and especially The Golden Number , an essay on the Pythagorean rites and rhythms in the development of occidental civilization, published in 1931, both of which Dalí had read in Paris before the war. The entire construction of the picture hinges on the development of a rigorous logarithmic spiral whose starting point is placed on the handle of the cup. In this canvas Dalí has resumed, but with a different arrangement, a theme inspired by Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead , which he had already used in 1932, in The True Picture of the Isle of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin at the Hour of the Angelus . The painting just mentioned belonged to the Baron von der Heydt, a friend of Hitler, on whom it made a very strong impression when the Baron showed it to him.
- The Last Supper, 1955 This work is another excellent example of Dalí's idea of Nuclear Mysticism, in which he has combined ideas of science and religion. As in several other Dalí masterworks (namely The Ecumenical Council ) we are unable to view the face of God here. The elements of the Catholic Eucharist, bread and wine, are present on the table, a direct reference back to Dalí's Catalonian heritage. The wondrous landscape of Dalí's homeland once again dominates the surrounding background, and the whole scene seems to be taking place inside some surreal and ethereal building. Perhaps even more importantly, this work translates Dalí's desire to become Classic in that he is adhering to the rules of Divine Proportion. The theory of the Golden Section, as forwarded by Euclid, created in Dalí a whole new painting style, in which these classical artistic techniques were elevated to modern levels of mastery.
- Among Dalí's masterworks of the 1960s, Tuna-Fishing occupies, along with The Hallucinogenic Toreador , the most prominent place. It took two full summers, in 1966 and 1967, for Dalí to finish this canvas swarming with Dionysiac figures. Tuna-Fishing is the result of forty years of passionate experiments in pictorial research. The artist has brought together in this great canvas painted in Port Lligat all his tendencies: Surrealism, "quintessential pompierism," pointillism, action painting, tachisme, geometric abstraction, Pop, Op and psychedelic art. He has summarized his studied purpose in this work which proves itself to be as significant as his unforgettable painting The Persistence of Memory of 1931 in The Museum of Modern Art in New York. " Tuna-Fishing is the most ambitious picture I have painted because it bears as a subtitle Homage to Meissonier . It is the reactualization of painting with a subject, underesteemed by all except the Surrealist group during the entire period called 'Avant-garde Art.' This epic topic was related to me by my father who, although a notary in Figueras in Catalonia, possessed a narrative gift worthy of Homer. He had shown me in his desk, at the same time, an engraving by a Swedish 'pompier' artist depicting tuna-fishing, which I also used in working out this oil. But, finally, I decided on this subject, which had tempted me all my life, after having read in Teilhard de Chardin that, according to him, the universe and the cosmos were probably limited, which has been confirmed by the latest scientific discoveries. I realized then that it is precisely this limitation, contraction, and limit to the cosmos and the universe which makes energy possible. Therefore, the protons, anti-protons, photons, pi-mesons, neutrons, all the elementary particles only possess this formidable hyperaesthetic energy because of these same limits and contractions of the universe. This, in a certain way, relieves us of the terrible anguish stemming from Pascal's theory that human beings were insignificant beside the cosmos, and brings us back to the idea that all the cosmos and all the universe converge in one point, which, in the present case, is the Tuna-Fishing . This accounts for the terrifying energy in this picture! Because all these fish, all those tuna, all the human beings in the act of killing them, personify the limited universe. In other words, since the Dalínian cosmos is limited to the space in the tuna-fishing, all the elements acquire from it the maximum of hyperaesthetic energy. The Tuna-Fishing is, therefore, a biological spectacle par excellence since, according to my father's description, the sea - which is cobalt blue and ends up being completely red with blood - is the superaesthetic force of modern biology. All births are preceded by a marvelous spurting of blood, blood is sweeter than honey. And it is to America in our era that the prerogative of blood belongs, since America's honor is thanks to Watson, the Nobel Prize winner, who was the first to find the molecular structure of dioxyribonucleic acid, which, along with the atomic bomb, is for Dalí the most hopeful future sign of afterlife and hibernation."
- St. George and the Dragon, 1962 Dalí painted an earlier version of the story of St. George and the Dragon in 1942, in which the dragon and St. George battle in the foreground of the painting. This version was painted in 1962, using oil on canvas. Unlike the 1942 version, the brushwork in the painting is quite brusque — almost as if it were rushed. Dalí often undertook work purely for monetary rewards, as his fame was such that any work with his signature on it would sell. This painting could easily have been a background to one of Dalí's portraits, such as They Were There (1931). St. George is dressed in a red tunic in the style of a Spanish cavalier, rather than the clothes of a medieval Englishman. The landscape also, though greener than Dalí's customary bleak deserts, is still typically Spanish in feel. This impression is aided by the appearance of the clump of buildings that can be seen in the central background. The buildings with their slopes and the color of burnt sienna have a definite Mediterranean feel to them. Dalí has not included the dragon in this painting, although the dark figure in the foreground forebodes death with its grim, almost spectral appearance.