Salvador Dali is a surrealist artist, boasting an understanding of whose paintings is not easy not only for an art critic, but also for a psychoanalyst. Dali himself, speaking about his painting, emphasized that if an artist does not fully understand his paintings, then how can anyone else be sure of their understanding? However, he clarified that this does not mean that they do not make sense. It's just that the meaning is so deep that ordinary logic cannot be grasped. To get closer to understanding Dali's paintings, it will be useful to consider several aspects that are reflected in his work.
El Salvador is the brother of El Salvador
Salvador Dali had a brother who died when he was 7 years old. The impressionable artist, as a child, felt the influence of this event. He imagined that his brother and he were united in him alone, and since the family continued to love the deceased brother too, it turned out that he seemed to take his place. Dali wrote that he was forced to prove to himself that he was not his dead brother at all, killing his brother within himself. The Castor and Pollux theme is especially frequent in his early paintings.
On the verge of insanity
When El Salvador grows, his skill crystallizes, which, together with fantasies, so captures the artist's mind that he admits that he almost succumbed to madness. Soon Dali met Gala - a woman whom he had already seen in his fantasies. Soon he copes with the glamor and begins to develop his "paranoid-critical method", which allows you to realize, embody and combine the most strange ideas in one picture. Reality and dream go hand in hand in his paintings, and finding the details of both is already a task for the viewer.
One of the most famous sayings of Salvador Dali: "The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."
Sexual aspect
The artist's sexual fantasies and problems are widely reflected in his canvases. He often writes to his wife, Gala, with various elements of food, commenting that at the time he "wanted to devour her." Later, he began to write Gala with a bread basket, which personified for Dali something almost divine, explaining that Gala in his hierarchy rose so high that it became his bread basket.
Psychoanalysis
Dali was fascinated by the ideas of psychoanalysis. In his youth, he read the works of Freud, and this was reflected in his canvases. He portrays his dreams as if inviting the viewer to reveal their meaning, using the methods of psychoanalysis. His painting with a soft clock, burning giraffes, telephones and elephants: all these are symbols, each of which had its own meaning in Dali's world.
Mysticism
The world around him could not help but influence the impressionable person that Dali has always been. He was deeply moved by the world wars, the explosion of the atomic bomb and other events. All this is reflected in his paintings. Often he also depicts religious subjects, interpreting them from the standpoint of his own psychoanalytic mysticism.
Dali himself explained that everything that happens in the world gives him a deep insight, thanks to which the artist intuitively understands everything that is happening around him, capturing it in his works.
Technique and worship of the old masters
Despite the impulsiveness and strange pictures that Dali created, he himself was always ready to logically justify many of his antics. His friend, the poet García Lorca, said that Dali is unique, if only because he retains a coldness and clarity of thinking about things that are at the same time the subject of deep excitement for him. In Dali's works, this was reflected, in particular, in his technique: he painted photographic canvases, striving in his technique to bypass the recognized masters of Renaissance painting.
