Fun facts about Dali

Dali was a very extravagant artist of the 20th century. Here are some fun facts about him and his life.

Dali leaves the academy of beaux-arts in Madrid because he said that nobody had the skills to evaluate his paintings.

Académie des beaux-arts, Madrid

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Dalí had erotic dreams of 12 year old girls and had an obsession for Hitler. The Central Committee of the Communist Party reacts, which summoned him in January 1934 to Breton.
He presented himself as sick: with a sweater and a thermometer.
Once the accusation was over, he read his argument by doing a striptease.
He said in a gross way that he was only transcribing his particular dreams.

Salvador Dali

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In 1936, Dali had the brilliant idea of ​​wearing a deep-diving suit at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Since he was eccentric, the witnesses thought he was gesticulating to be comical when he nearly died choking.

Salavador Dali in deep-diving suit

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He went to the university in a yellow and black Rolls-Royce, filled with cauliflowers, which he gave as autographs.

Black and yellow Rolls Royce

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He had an ocelot as a pet.

Salvador Dali and his ocelot

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He collaborated with Walt Disney for an animated film: Destino.

Destino, Walt Disney & Salvador Dali

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He made the original logo of the brand Chup Chups.

Chupa Chups logo

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For the launch of a perfume named « Fracas », Dali, in charge of making a work for the showcase of the store, appeared on the day of the launch and just threw a pavement in the window of the shop.

Perfume Fracas

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According to Dali, the Perpignan train station is the center of the world.

Salvador Dali at the Perpignan train station

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Dali created his own museum in his villa and asked to be buried there.

Dali museum

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Dali met Alice Cooper in a strange way. First, according to Alice Cooper, Dali came with a giraffe skin coat and curly boots. He ordered a cup of hot water.
Then, he gave to Alice Cooper a sculpture of his brain that contained an éclair au chocolat covered with real living ants.

Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper

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One day in Paris, while living in the Hotel Meurice, Dali summoned the press. In his suite he prepared bags that contain liquid paints. He opened the window, stepped on the balcony and threw the bags of paint on the parked cars. He named the painting Explosion.

Salvador Dali at the Hotel Meurice

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in the Netherlands. His father is a pastor. Vincent receives a religious education.

Painting is a tradition among Van Gogh. They are art dealers. At 16, the young Vincent will work at Goupil & Cie, a famous art gallery.

Vincent will stay working for 5 years at the gallery. He is then promoted and leaves for the London gallery. Vincent is now 21 years old. It’s in London that he meets Ursula, a woman he madly falls in love with. But, after a few months, Ursula announces that she is no longer interested.

Vincent is devastated and decides to dedicate his life to God. He makes all the steps to become a pastor, like his father. He will attend theology classes for over a year. Finally Vincent realizes that he need action and that books don’t interest him. He decides to quit his training as a pastor, he now wants to become a religious missionary!

Autoportrait, Vincent, Van Gogh, 1889

After 3 months of internship, Vincent Van Gogh starts his mission. However, after 6 months, the committee decides to withdraw his mission: they think that Vincent is a madman.

New failure for Vincent, new challenge. Since childhood, Vincent likes to draw. And he draws pretty well. In 1880, at the age of 27, he made a decision that would change his life forever: he would be an artist! He moved to the Netherlands and began learning painting.

Les mangeurs de pommes de terre, Vincent Van Gogh, 1885

In 1885, Van Gogh decided to leave the cold of the Netherlands. Van Gogh makes a stay in Paris. There, he meets the greatest artists of the moment such as Pissarro, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. Paul Gauguin and Vincent will become friends.

Van Gogh settled in Arles at the age of 35. He paints continuously. From morning till night, he paints. More than 200 paintings in 15 months!

Les tournesols, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

At the end of 1888, Vincent asked his friend Gauguin to join him. However, this is going badly. Two months after his arrival, December 23, 1888, a dispute turns out badly. Gauguin flees. Van Gogh is found the next morning in bed, bathed in his blood. He misses an ear.

Autoportrait à l’oreille bandée et à la pipe, Vincent Ven Gogh, 1889

Then, Van Gogh will multiply the attacks of dementia. This period of struggle against his own madness is also where he produces his finest works.

La Nuit étoilée, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

On July 27, 1890, at 37, he committed suicide with a bullet in his chest. His agony will last 36 hours.

How to recognize painters?

If everyone has malformations, it’s Pablo Piccaso.

Jeune fille aux cheveux noirs (Dora Maar), Pablo Picasso, 1939

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If it looks like an acid trip, even the name, it’s Salavador Dali.

Construction molle aux haricots bouillis, Salvador Dali, 1936

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If everyone, even the women, looks like Putin, it’s Jan Van Eyck.

Les Époux Arnolfini, Jan Van Eyck, 1434

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If it’s a portrait of a woman with a mono-eyebrow and a mustache, it’s Frida Kahlo.

Autoportrait au collier d’épines et colibri, Frida Kahlo, 1940

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If all the women have eaten too much Nutella, it’s Pierre Paul Rubens.

Les trois Grâces, Pierre Paul Rubens, 1639

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If there is a dark background and everyone looks tortured, it’s Tiziano Vecellio.

Madeleine pénitente, Tiziano Vecellio, 1533

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If there is tons of people but otherwise seems normal, it’s Pieter Brueghel l’Ancien.

Le massacre des innocents, Pieter Brueghel l’Ancien, 1565

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If there are tons of people but this time very weird things happened, it’s Jérôme Bosch.

Le jardin des délices, Jérôme Bosch, 1503

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If it looks like coloured Excel sheet, it’s Piet Mondrian.

Composition en rouge, jaune, bleu et noir, Piet Mondrian, 1926

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that began in the mid-1950s. It was created in England but spread rapidly to the western world.

This movement is guided by the role of the consumer society. This is what artists want to highlight: the influence of advertisements, magazines, comics and television on our lives.

Sleeping girl, Roy Lichtenstein, 1964

Pop art is based on the new technologies to represent a whole generation. For example, pop art uses some techniques that were not considered artistic but rather industrial at the time.

Map, Jasper Johns, 1961

Pop art moves away from traditions, it use popular symbols: from Mickey Mouse to Marilyn Monroe. Artists want to open art to everyone and not to an elite. The advertising culture of the consumer society is another source of inspiration, for example for Jasper Johns. The notion of art changed. Remove an object from its context and isolate it or combine it with other objects for contemplation is considered as art. In fact, the concept of pop art is more in the process in which the work is done than in the final work.

Quadrant Mickey Mouse, Andy Warhol, 1981

The reception of the public was very good from the beginning of the movement. Indeed, pop art speaks to people in a simple and accessible way. For example, the processes used by artists are often new products: acrylic, silk screen… The colours are often bright. Andy Warhol, one of the creators of the pop art movement, appropriates objects of everyday life (a glass bottle or a can of soup) to make artworks.

Campbell’s Soup Cans, Andy Warhol, 1962

This movement has disrupted the artistic world: for example, the fact that an artwork is unique was not true anymore. Warhol reproduced artworks by tens, sometimes even hundreds. But above all, the pop art movement questioned the very definition of art.

Cubism

Cubism is an early 20th-century artistic movement that is a revolution in painting and sculpture. It also influences architecture, literature, and music.

Cubism represent objects analysed, decomposed and reassembled into an abstract composition, as if the artist multiplied different points of view.

Violon et bougie, Georges Braque, 1910

 

Developed from 1907 on the initiative of the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, cubism knows its apogee during the period known as analytical cubism (1910-1912) with works by artists such as Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Leger.

In 1906, Georges Braque methodically studied the outline lines of Cézanne’s paintings and gradually led to compositions that used slight interruptions in the lines, such as in Nature morte au pichet and Maisons à l’Estaque.

Maisons à l’Estaque, Georges Braque, 1907

From 1907, Braque and Picasso experiments a lot of things. They gradually realize paintings that tend towards abstraction. They are characterized by a research on geometry and represented forms: all objects are divided and reduced into simple geometric shapes, often squares.

The traditional perspective is often reversed, with broken lines.

Picasso decomposes the image into multiple facets (or cubes, hence the name of cubism) and destroys the forms of reality, that leads into strange figures sometimes.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1907

From 1910 to 1912, Braque and Picasso are closer than ever. The two painters apply their discoveries at the same time and not only to the landscapes, but also to the human figure.

They abandon the unique point of view of the motif to introduce multiple points of view from different angles in the same work : they get rid of perspective.

La femme qui pleure, Pablo Picasso, 1937

« Cubism is an absolutely original pictorial language, a totally new way of approaching the world, and a conceptualized aesthetic theory. We understand that it was able to give a new direction to all modern painting », John Golding.

Impressionism

Impressionism is an art movement of the second half of the 19th century.

This movement was born in France, more precisely in Paris, from the association of several French painters.

We are at the beginning of the 19th century, the painting is dominated by the Académie des Beaux-Arts which defines the rules of good taste (the theme of the paintings, the techniques…). However, artists such as François Boucher, Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Watteau, who are part of the academy for some, want to add something into the painting. Indeed, the theme and the colours of their paintings evolve.

With the invention of the flexible paint tube and its marketing in France in 1859, young painters come out of workshops to paint outdoors, to capture the moment and light.

Until then painting was trying to faithfully represent reality. But with the invention of photography, these young painters want to re-transcribe their impressions in the face of reality in their paintings and no longer to accurately describe reality. Among these painters, there are Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne and Armand Guillaumin.

The Impressionist painting technique was invented in the summer of 1869 when Renoir and Monet painted La Grenouillère and respectively Bain à la Grenouillère.

La Grenouillère, Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1869

This movement is characterized by small tables, visible brush strokes, open composition, and the use of unusual angles of view.

The impressionist movement is at first strongly criticized. Impressionist paintings are refused at the Salon de Paris, a major institution of painting. For this reason, the Impressionists decided to create the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs in 1874. This company allows them to organize their own exhibition in April 1874.

Impression, soleil levant, Claude Monet, 1872

Gradually, the Impressionists won the favour of the public and their peers. In 1886 an exhibition organized in New York was a great success for the Impressionists.

The movement will not last more than a decade but it will have exploded the art market and especially will open the way to many new paintings movements such as pointillism, symbolism… The movement has inspired many artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec…

Iris, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889