Dali

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech, aka Salvador Dali is one of the worlds most known Surrealists.  His most famous painting is "The Persistence of Memory" (see below picture).  He is a Spanish painter, but had his hand in many American productions. In my Art History class, we talked a bit about him and I'd like to share a little about what I have learned and my reflections on it.

Dali, like Monet, was the son of a wealthy family.  He was born in 1904, just making it to the 20th century.  He grew up and went to a fine art inistitution in Spain.  He built a home there with his wife and many of his paintings deal with his love for his home country.  In one year, he held his first one-man art show, joined the Surrealists ( style of art in the 20th century stressing the subconsciou or nonrational) which were led by a former Dadaist (basically a style where they tried to change everyone's perceptions on art), and met his wife Gala who eventually started taking over the business side of his art.  It is after all this that I think Dali's life really got interesting.  War was brewing and in 1934, Dali's lack of political fervor got him kicked out of the Surrealist group although he did show with the Surrealists for the rest of that decade.  After WWII started getting more and more serious, in 1940 Dali and his wife moved to the United States where he eventually met up with none other than Walt Disney.

In 1946, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney started on a collaboration that took 57 years to complete.  It was a cartoon, but as you can imagine, with Dali involved, it wasn't going to be your run-of-the-mill show.  Dali and John Hench (Disney studio artists) spent 8 months on the storyboard.  They even managed to get 17 seconds of the actual cartoon produced.  But the project was suddenly abandoned when the Disney company started to run into financial problems.  In 1999, while Walt Disney's nephew was working on Fantasia 2000, he found all the old storyboards and the original clip and decided to bring it back to life.  It took 25 animators roughly 3 years to complete the project, but they did it.  Here is the clip of Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.  A cartoon that, in my opinion, exemplifies the Surrealist idea.  Not just a story about a girl, but a look into the creative mind of a wonderful artist.  I give you: Destino