Painting techniques of the masters
Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)
Salvador Dali joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 in Paris and evolved an art and lifestyle that was to personify Surrealism. Dali developed the deep illusionistic space of the painter Giorgio de Chirico into a setting for paintings of a dream like and almost paranoiac quality, and from 1929 to 1932 Dali painted a series of small works of unequalled hallucinatory intensity. "The Persistence of Memory", one of his most celebrated of this series, shows a beech near Port Lligat with the distant rocks lit by the transparent light of the end of the day. Dali described the appearance of the floppy watches as 'Like fillets of sole, they are destined to be swallowed by the sharks of time'. He found inspiration for the image after eating a runny camembert cheese. Dalis' work is characterised by disturbing and recurring images. For example, the limp, womb-like creature that straddles over a rock in the foreground was an obsessional image for him at the time.
The jewel-like intensity of "The Persistence of Memory" was achieved in the application of paint. The luminosity is conveyed by the careful tonal graduation of the paint layers from the dark foreground to the yellow glow of the fading light in the background. Dalis' delicate brushwork and painstakingly careful building-up of the paint mark a reaction against the ideas of the autonomy of colour and brushstroke which occupied his contemporary artists. In many ways, Dalis technique looks back to nineteenth century painters such as Vermeer.
Dalis' technique sought to duplicate the appearance of a touched-up photograph to the point where it was impossible to tell the difference from what Dali called his 'handmade photograph' with a collage of actual photographs. In doing this, he was using a technique that people had grown to accept as a confirmation of reality, as a means to undermine reality. Dalis' revival of the photographic illusionism in the 1920s and '30s was seen at the time as an attack on the very notion of art. This challenge was to appear to question the basis and status of art: If it is impossible to tell the difference between a photograph and a painting, how could the painting be called art? However, over the years, thanks in part to the re-awakening of interest in Realist painting of the nineteenth century and the growth of movements like photo-realism. Dalis' technique is now acknowleged to have a major contribution to the history of twentieth century painting.