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Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, U.S. Library of Congress
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was a Spanish painter best known for his contributions to surrealism. Writer Andre Breton said,
"Dalí has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiaccritical method, which has immediately show itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis." (Lecture at Brussels, 1934)
The rest of this post is some quotes from Dalí.
"This book will prove that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind." (Diary of a Genius, 1964)
"Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, [when I] spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life." (Interview with Victor Bockris, 1974)
"I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'... I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'." (Diary of a Genius, 1964)
"My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident." (My Pictorial Struggle, 1935)
"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition." (My Pictorial Struggle, 1935)
