Happy Birthday Dali!

The great artist Salvador Dali was born on this date in Spain in 1904.  I've posted his most famous work The Persistence of Memory just below.  This is the one they use most frequently in Art History books when referring to either Dali, or surrealism.  It's hardly his best work, but it's the one everyone is familiar with.  The reclining, seemingly sleeping figure in the middle is called The Great Masturbator.  No kidding!

Dali was probably the most famous of all the surrealists, which was actually started as an artistic movement by a phrench poet named Andre Breton.  The Surrealists eagerly embraced Dali and his works into their fold.  Years later they became disgusted with his "greed" (aka – desire for monetary success) and blatant commercialism and he was "kicked out" of the movement.  He had by that time all but entirely eclipsed anyone else claiming to be a surrealist in terms of fame and recognition.Dali himself was a famously odd duck and he reveled in his strangeness.  How many of his antics were deliberate acts of self-promotion and how many were true expressions of his personality are a matter of debate.  In his autobiography Dali claims to have tasted his own feces because he was curious about the flavor.  There’s a starting point for you – there’s tons of stuff on the web about him, so I leave to you to go looking.

One of the things I liked most about Dali was his ability to draw.  Consider the drawing entitled Combat below:

The brutal savagery of these two figures exploding into each other encapsulates the concept of "combat" like nothing else I've ever seen.  From a strictly technical point of view, the drawing skills displayed here are nothing short of phenomenal.