Salvador Dali on Portraits

The enormous ego that Dali had concerning himself, his work, and his personal style, is no secret of course. I think if Dali could have convinced subjects to somehow more resemble their portraits he absolutely would have.

"The reason that some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures."

-Salvador Dali

Thank Goddess Dali never had this power, else we would have some very unnaturally strange people walking around, (which might be fun for us, but certainly not for the person themselves). Looking back at Dali's life and work; I find his enormous ego funny and endearing at times, other times it is simply overbearing and distracts from his paintings. As I have said in my other quotes from Dali, my humble opinion is that I don't think surrealism (the movement Dali helped pioneer) was at the forefront of modern art. I am much more a Duchamp fan myself, and wonder what kind of work Dali would have done had he been a tad more conceptual. Let's not forget though that surrealism gave us in many ways what is an unmatched contribution to the world that is still reverberating, an unparalleled commitment to the imagination, and for that I am forever grateful.

Thoughts on Surrealism

Although I do appreciate Salvador Dali's insanely incredible collection of paintings he produced, (ab0ut 8000), I disagree with a lot of his philosophy when it comes to painting. This quote lends to the notion that although Dali was a master of representing reality in a new way, he had difficulty reinterpreting it:

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

-Salvador Dali

He considered himself quite radical with his surrealistic style. But in my book, when for example the Dada movement, and the first formally non-representational paintings were produced decades before Dali became successful, this is just not true. Of course he is a master painter with great style, I'm just saying he wasn't on the forefront of modern art, that is for sure. Fellow Spanish painter Picasso was born 23 years before Dali, and Picasso's style is years ahead of his. But I'm not putting down the man by any means, I am just saying I don't personally dig art that is so reliant on already known images, even if they are all twisted about.

Cubist Self Portrait, Salvador Dali, 1923.

Salvador Dali Quote

"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

- Salvador dali

This is an interesting quote to me because it pertains to that Dada element of modern art that is contrary to tradition, but more so because as much as Dali was inventive and groundbreaking with his vision, his methods were purely academic. He was a supporter of realism, and as crazy has his compositions were, they were still painted and drawn using classical methods in a realist style. Conceptual art much more destroys the shackles of limiting vision than surrealism did, and a lot of great conceptual art like the Dada movement, abstract expressionism, and the idea of sculpting light has art; happened before and during Dali's heyday.