Word: daly
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...Dali went to art school in Madrid in the early 1920s. "I'll be a genius," he wrote in his diary two years before that. "Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius." Cold and diligent, he figured out all his poses and provocations in advance. Politically, too, he wanted to be shocking; later Dali would turn into an archconservative, the living national treasure of Franco's long regime, but in the 1920s -- the years of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship -- he was a vehement parlor red. He even did jail time...
...Back, 1925. It is an easy matter to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark shadows cast by figures on a flat ground-plane, the idealized desert of his paintings. Dali's obsession with Picasso reached a height of imitative flattery with his pastiches of the older painter's massive "classical" women in white fluted dresses. Likewise, when Dali...
...originality as an artist began with his peculiar experiences of the natural world, such as the contorted rocks at Cape Creus, near his boyhood home, sculpted into fantastically ambiguous shapes by tide and weather; like faces seen in the fire, these were the foundation stones of what Dali called his "paranoiac-critical method" of seeking dream images. Dali's art may not tap far into his unconscious, but it reveals a great deal about what he imagined his unconscious...
Perhaps the most important imaginative relationships in young Dali's life were with people, not paintings: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the future filmmaker Luis Bunuel. United in their loathing of bourgeois convention -- Dali and Lorca coined the term putrefact for any stale idea or piece of kitsch that offended their nostrils -- the three were, in fact, very different creatures. Bunuel never lost his anarchic iconoclasm, whereas middle age ended Dali's; but the films they made together (An Andalusian Dog, 1929, and The Golden Age, 1930) remain classics of provocation. For a few years, Lorca and Dali found...
...crystalline and extravagant beauty of Lorca's imagery helped release similar qualities in Dali's work; above all, it was the poet's baroque character, his preoccupation with death, sex and the morbidity of flesh, that encouraged the younger artist's imagination. The mark Lorca left on Dali's art was not its modernity but its extreme Spanishness. But that, too, is why Dali's best work has lasted...