The Art of Dali

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

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"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

"There is only one difference between a madman and me - The madman thinks he is sane - I know I am mad."

"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali."

- Salvador Dali

One of the most remarkable and famous paintings by Salvador Dali painted 1931 and owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

La persistencia de la memoria (1931) or The Persistence of Memory is the most famous painting by artist Salvador Dalí. The painting has also been popularly known as Soft Watches, Droopy Watches, The Persistence of Time, or Melting Clocks.

It has been owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934. It was, however, on display at the Salvador Dalí Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida, (1 February - 1 June 2008). The Persistence of Memory returned to the Museum of Modern Art in June 2008 as part of the exhibition Dalí and Film, on view from 29 June - 15 September, 2008.

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Surrealism is an artistic movement and philosophy that first gained popularity in the 1920s. Initially, surrealism was an offshoot of Dadaism, which posited that traditional art should be replaced with anything "anti-art" and triumphed the ridiculous, the absurd, and a basic disregard for form. Andre Breton was the initial proponent of surrealism in literature and the visual arts. Much of his emphasis was on accessing the unconscious, as viewed by psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Surrealism was a reaction to the philosophy of rationalism, which many felt had caused, through the Industrial Revolution, the disaster of World War I.

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