May 11: Happy 🎂 Birthday Salvador Dali (1904-1989).
Salvador Dali was born in Spain on May 11, 1904. He was one of the most famous and unusual artists of the twentieth century. Salvador Dali's best-known paintings are called surrealistic. Surrealism began in Paris in 1924 and continued through the 1930's. The Surrealists explored dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and other images of the subconscious mind. Most of Salvador Dali's paintings are filled with mysterious objects or familiar objects that have been oddly changed. Even though the things Dali painted look very real, his paintings could be difficult to understand. That is because many of the scenes he chose to paint came right out of his dreams.
Julia is reading Salvador Dali, Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists book (buy here).
Salvador Dali's childhood was very tumultuous. A tragedy had happened right before Salvador Dali was born. His parents had lost their first child and subsequently called their newborn son after the child they had just lost. They treated the new Salvador as though he were their first son, giving him a lot of attention and overprotecting him. As a result, Salvador felt very confused growing up. After he grew up, Dali kept doing things to get attention, like arriving at an event in a limousine filled with cauliflowers, or giving a talk about his art while wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He even said he received messages from outer space. Dali was not afraid to show his strangest thoughts or dreams in his paintings. He often showed things in his paintings that he remembered from his childhood, even the things that frightened him. Some of the Surrealists felt that Dali's dreams were too strange, and they expressed their concerns to Dali. Salvador ended up leaving the Surrealists group and continued to paint exactly the way he wanted for the rest of his life.
Adrian is holding one of Dali Paintings postcards (buy a set here).
Dali's paintings look almost like photographs because he worked with tiny brushes to make his brush marks as invisible as possible. Salvador Dali was always surprising people with his showmanship. He is one of the few great artists who became as famous as his artwork.
Happy Birthday 🎂 Salvador Dali!
For more on World's Greatest Artists🎨 Series, read here a post about Vincent van Gogh, and here about Claude Monet.
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