Salvador Dali's Surrealism Analysis

Freeing artists from traditional painting and sculpture, surrealism was an art movement founded in Paris in 1924 .Inner thoughts were explored, the subconscious and the imagination were the main tools used to create a new surreal world based on these suppressed thoughts and fantasies. Surrealism was a reflection of Freud’s study of psychoanalysis, in which he provides an explanation on how dreams are sources of knowledge and shows the battle between conscious ideas and unconscious hidden desires. Surrealist artists were inspired to explore this dark thread and uncover the mysterious world of desires and fantasies. This art movement evolved and spread to other countries continuing throughout the 20th century. Salvador Dali, a Spanish painter,

This exploration of the unconscious on the canvas is what he called his “ paranoiac-critical method”; where he takes some elements experienced in his state of unconsciousness and represent them in his paintings as realistically as possible so that the viewer can interpret it in his own way, using his own experience of the unconscious. He also states that his method is simply the organization of his inner thoughts represented through the balance between subjectivity and objectivity, by relating unusual objects together and using optical illusions . Dali wanted to explore this hidden realm, to discover any personal fears or traumas, that will further help him understand this part of our mind and furthermore represent it in his paintings. He strove to relate dreams to reality to reach the state of ‘ sur-reality’. Just like Freud, Dali explained that dreams come from the subconscious part of the mind, representing suppressed ideas that are usually considered taboo in the real word we live in. “The Great Masturbator” an oil on canvas was painted in 1929, it is a representation of Dali’s sexuality and his

It is the exploration of part of our mind that our reality is unaware of. This movement helped artist explore new techniques and methods, encouraging them to explore new concepts. Its main goal was to depict a new world composed of our hidden ideas and fantasies, mostly based on our dreams. Influenced by Freud’s study and interpretation of dreams Salvador Dali based himself on psychoanalytical studies to create compositions representing his surreality. In order to accomplish a surreal painting, Dali focused solely on the unconscious part of his mind to uncover its hidden messages, using a method called the ' paranoiac critical method’ as seen in “The Great Masturbator. As for the technical part of his paintings, Dali based himself on mathematics and physics studies to represent figures in a more realistic way. He was influenced greatly by quantum mechanics and the study of perception and dimension that helped him find a balance between irrational ideas and realistic representation as seen in his series of paintings that are related to his religious beliefs; “Christ of saint john of the cross”, and “Crucifixion”. Symbolism was also present in his paintings, some of them were used to represent ideas and others to refer to a memory found in his subconscious. They were often repeated in several paintings and held hidden messages.Dali’s painting held dark themes and represented landscapes and weird figures