Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

Founding of the movement

The word ''surrealist'' was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play ''Les Mamelles de Tirésias'', which was first performed in 1917.

World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.

During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."

Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal ''Littérature'' along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote ''The Magnetic Fields'' (1920).

Continuing to write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. The group grew to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy. As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.

Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. Later, Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."

Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy, which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.".

The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.

In 1924 they declared their philosophy in the first "Surrealist Manifesto". That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began publishing the journal ''La Révolution surréaliste''.

Surrealist Manifesto

Breton wrote the manifesto of 1924 that defines the purposes of the group. He included citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as:

''La Révolution surréaliste''

Shortly after releasing the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'', the Surrealists published the inaugural issue of ''La Révolution surréaliste''. Publication continued into 1929. As the first directors, Naville and Péret modeled the format of the journal on the conservative scientific review ''La Nature.'' To the Surrealists' delight, the journal was consistently scandalous and revolutionary. While the focus was on writing, the journal also included reproductions of art, among them works by Giorgio de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray.

Bureau of Surrealist Research

The Bureau of Surrealist Research (Centrale Surréaliste) was the center for Surrealist writers and artists to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews. They investigated speech under trance.

Expansion

The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania.

Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, and later after the second war: Enrico Donati. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, René Char, and Georges Sadoul.

In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle. The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive and naive arts.

André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 ''Torso'', which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.

However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's '' Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen)'' with ''The Kiss (Le Baiser)'' from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art. Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. ''The Red Tower (La tour rouge)'' from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 ''The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poete)'' has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel ''Hebdomeros'' presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.

In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting, explicitly leading to the ''La Peinture Surrealiste'' exhibition of 1925, held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published ''Surrealism and Painting'' in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.

Major exhibitions in the 1920s

1925 - ''La Peinture Surrealiste'' - The first ever Surrealist exhibition at Gallerie Pierre in Paris. Displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), techniques from Dada, such as photomontage were used.

Galerie Surréaliste opened on March 26, 1926 with an exhibition by Man Ray.

Writing continues

The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was ''Les Champs Magnétiques'' (May–June 1919). ''Littérature'' contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images."

Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose.

Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella," and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.

Examples of Surrealist literature are Crevel's ''Mr. Knife Miss Fork'' (1931), Aragon's ''Irene's Cunt'' (1927), Breton's ''Sur la route de San Romano'' (1948), Péret's ''Death to the Pigs'' (1929), and Artaud's ''Le Pese-Nerfs'' (1926).

''La Révolution surréaliste'' continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.

Surrealist films

Early films by Surrealists include:

''Entr'acte'' by René Clair (1924)

''La Coquille et le clergyman'' by Germaine Dulac, screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1928)

''L'Étoile de mer'' by Man Ray (1928)

''Un Chien Andalou'' by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (1929)

''L'Âge d'Or'' by Buñuel and Dalí (1930)

''Le sang d'un poète'' by Jean Cocteau (1930)

''L’imitation du cinema'' by Marcel Mariën 1959

Surrealist theatre

The word ''surrealist'' was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), which was later adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc.

Antonin Artaud, an early Surrealist, rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. He thought that rational discourse comprised "falsehood and illusion." Theorising a new theatrical form that would be immediate and direct, that would link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created the Theatre of Cruelty, in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams.

The other major theatre practitioner to have experimented with surrealism in the theatre is the Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca, particularly in his plays ''The Public'' (1930), ''When Five Years Pass'' (1931), and ''Play Without a Title'' (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's ''Backs to the Wall'' (1925) and Roger Vitrac's ''The Mysteries of Love'' (1927) and ''Victor, or The Children Take Over'' (1928). Gertrude Stein's opera ''Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights'' (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism," though it is also related to a theatrical form of cubism.

Music by Surrealists

In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work ''Arcana'' was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's publication ''Adieu Marie''.

Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 Ballet ''Paris-Magie'' (scenario by Lise Deharme), the Operas ''La Petite Sirène'' (book by Philippe Soupault) and ''Le Maître'' (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s.

Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay ''Silence is Golden,'' later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon, have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by David Honeyboy Edwards.

Surrealism and international politics

Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world: In some places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places on political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the ''Mandrágora'' group in Chile in 1938), Central America, the Caribbean, and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.

Politically, Surrealism was Trotskyist, communist, or anarchist. The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left communism. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low and Juan Breá joined the POUM during the Spanish Civil War.

Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the "liberation of man." However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Louis Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the Communists.

Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the ''Declaration of January 27, 1925'', for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, and, Antonin Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the ''Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art'', published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.

However, in 1933 the Surrealists’ assertion that a 'proletarian literature' within a capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.

In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group announced:

:"We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question."

The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by René Crevel, signed by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called 'black Surrealism', although it is the contact between Aimé Césaire and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of what is known as 'black Surrealism'.

Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the Négritude movement of Martinique, a French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method - a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal ''Tropiques'', featuring the work of Cesaire along with Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée and others, was first published in 1941.

It is interesting to note that when in 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife the painter Jacqueline Lamba to Mexico to meet Trotsky; staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife Guadalupe Marin; he met Frida Kahlo and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.

Internal politics

In 1929 the satellite group around the journal ''Le Grand Jeu'', including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry and the Czech painter Josef Sima, was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in the second ''manifeste du surréalisme'' excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action, a list which included Leiris, Georges Limbour, Max Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. Excluded members launched a counterattack, sharply criticizing Breton in the pamphlet ''Un Cadavre'', which featured a picture of Breton wearing a crown of thorns. The pamphlet drew upon an earlier act of subversion by likening Breton to Anatole France, whose unquestioned value Breton had challenged in 1924.

In hindsight, the disunion of 1929-30 and the effects of ''Un Cadavre'' had very little negative impact upon Surrealism as Breton saw it, since core figures such as Aragon, Crevel, Dalí and Buñuel remained true the idea of group action, at least for the time being. The success (or at least the controversy) of Dalí and Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or in December 1930 had a regenerative effect, drawing a number of new recruits, and encouraging countless new artistic works the following year and throughout the 1930s.

Disgruntled surrealists moved to the periodical ''Documents'', edited by Georges Bataille, whose anti-idealist materialism formed a hybrid Surrealism intending to expose the base instincts of humans. To the dismay of many, ''Documents'' fizzled out in 1931, just as Surrealism seemed to be gathering more steam.

There were a number of reconciliations after this period of disunion, such as between Breton and Bataille, while Aragon left the group after committing himself to the communist party in 1932. More members were ousted over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal, while others left of to pursue creativity of their own style.

By the end of World War II the surrealist group led by André Breton decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself." "Breton was consistent in his support for the francophone Anarchist Federation and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists around Fontenis transformed the FA into the Federation Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new FA set up by the synthesist anarchists and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA."

Golden age

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions.

Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's ''Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)'' is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's ''Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire)'', with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his ''The Persistence of Memory'', which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealist Group in Paris issued the periodical ''Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution'' as the successor of ''La Révolution surréaliste''.

From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes. During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British artist John Tunnard.

Major exhibitions in the 1930s

1936 - ''London International Surrealist Exhibition'' is organised in London by the art historian Herbert Read, with an introduction by André Breton.

1936 - Museum of Modern Art in New York shows the exhibition ''Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism''.

1938 - A new ''International Surrealist Exhibition'' was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. ''Surrealist Street'' filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. He designed the main hall to seem like subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting, so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. The floor was carpeted with dead leaves, ferns and grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.

World War II and the Post War period

World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism, and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America, and relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Roberto Matta, converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American avant-garde in New York City swung decisively towards Abstract Expressionism with the support of key taste makers, including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II. In particular, Arshile Gorky and Wolfgang Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art, Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism.

The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine ''VVV'' with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri Ford, and his magazine ''View'' which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The ''View'' special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton, founding his journal Dyn.

Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement.

During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America. Mark Rothko took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled ''Surrealism Unlimited'', was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in 2002, and died three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's ''Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personnelles)'' and 1954's ''Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)''. Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as ''Castle in the Pyrenees (Le Château des Pyrénées)'', which refers back to ''Voix'' from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.

Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto Matta (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism."

After the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Endre Rozsda returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.

Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner for themselves. Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example, with Tanning's ''Rainy Day Canape'' from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole.

Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind, as with the publication ''The Tower of Light'' in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating the human mind.

Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s 1942 - ''First Papers of Surrealism'' - New York - The Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works. He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.

1947 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris

1959 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris

1960 - ''Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain'' - New York

Post-Breton Surrealism

There is no clear consensus about the end, or if there was an end, to the Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that World War II effectively disbanded the movement. However, art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie the obituary of the movement to the 1989 death of Salvador Dalí.

In the 1960s, the artists and writers grouped around the Situationist International were closely associated with Surrealism. While Guy Debord was critical of and distanced himself from Surrealism, others, such as Asger Jorn, were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The events of May 1968 in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar Surrealist ones. Joan Miró would commemorate this in a painting titled ''May 1968.'' There were also groups who associated with both currents and were more attached to Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group.

In Europe and all over the world since the 1960s, artists have combined Surrealism with what is believed to be a classical 16th century technique called mischtechnik, a kind of mix of egg tempera and oil paint rediscovered by Ernst Fuchs, a contemporary of Dalí, and now practiced and taught by many followers, including Robert Venosa and Chris Mars. The former curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Michael Bell, has called this style "veristic Surrealism", which depicts with meticulous clarity and great detail a world analogous to the dream world. Other tempera artists, such as Robert Vickrey, regularly depict Surreal imagery.

During the 1980s, behind the Iron Curtain, Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University of Wrocław. They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski regime, and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself.

Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City held an exhibit, ''Two Private Eyes'', in 1999, and in 2001 Tate Modern held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the Met in New York City held a show, ''Desire Unbound,'' and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris a show called ''La Révolution surréaliste''.

Impact of Surrealism

While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination. In addition to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, Surrealism is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectical in its thought.

Other sources used by Surrealism epigons

Surrealists have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers, Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that Surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against society, Surrealism finds precedents in the alchemists, possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud.

1960s riots

Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties — and indirectly — through the way in which Surrealists' emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" rose directly from French Surrealist thought and practice.

Postmodernism and popular culture

Many significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the Postmodern era; though there's no widely agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism.

Many writers from and associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers show significant evidence of Surrealist influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Artaud in particular was very influential to many of the Beats, but especially Ginsberg and Carl Solomon. Ginsberg cites Artaud's "Van Gogh -- The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on "Howl", along with Apollinaire's "Zone", Garcia Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman", and Schwitters' "Priimiititiii". The structure of Breton's "Free Union" had a significant influence on Ginsberg's "Kaddish". In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met their heroes Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Benjamin Peret, and to show their admiration Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off Duchamp's tie.

William S. Burroughs, a core member of the Beat Generation and a very influential postmodern novelist, developed what he called the "cut-up technique" with former surrealist Brion Gysin -- in which chance is used to dictate the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources—referring to it as the "Surrealist Lark" and recognizing its debt to the techniques of Tristan Tzara.

Postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was also influenced by Beat fiction, experimented since the 1960s with the surrealist idea of startling juxtapositions; commenting on the "necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill", he added that "any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, 'One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'"

Many other postmodern fiction writers have been directly influenced by Surrealism. Paul Auster, for example, has translated Surrealist poetry and said the Surrealists were "a real discovery" for him. Salman Rushdie, when called a Magical Realist, said he saw his work instead "allied to surrealism". For the work of other postmodernists, such as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, a broad comparison to Surrealism is common.

Magic realism, a popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like, as in the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Carlos Fuentes was inspired by the revolutionary voice in Surrealist poetry and points to inspiration Breton and Artaud found in Fuentes' homeland, Mexico. Though Surrealism was a direct influence on Magic Realism in its early stages, many Magic Realist writers and critics, such as Amaryll Chanady and S. P. Ganguly, while acknowledging the similarities, cite the many differences obscured by the direct comparison of Magic Realism and Surrealism such as an interest in psychology and the artefacts of European culture they claim is not present in Magic Realism. A prominent example of a Magic Realist writer who points to Surrealism as an early influence is Alejo Carpentier who also later criticized Surrealism's dilineation between real and unreal as not representing the true South American experience.

Surrealist groups

:''See also :Category:Surrealist groups.''

Surrealist individuals and groups have attempted to carry on with Surrealism after the death of André Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster in 1969.

Surrealism and the theatre

Surrealist theatre and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" were inspirational to many within the group of playwrights that the critic Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd" (in his 1963 book of the same name). Though not an organized movement, Esslin grouped these playwrights together based on some similarities of theme and technique; Esslin argues that these similarities may be traced to an influence from the Surrealists. Eugène Ionesco in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English. Other notable playwrights whom Esslin groups under the term, for example Arthur Adamov and Fernando Arrabal, were at some point members of the Surrealist group.

Surrealism and film

:''See also, List of surrealist films.''

Surrealism and comedy

Criticism of Surrealism

Feminist

Feminists have in the past critiqued the Surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a male movement and a male fellowship, despite the celebrated women surrealists such as Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Feminist critics believe that it adopts archaic attitudes toward women, such as worshiping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. Women are often made to represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery.

One of the pioneers in feminist critique of Surrealism was Xavière Gauthier. Her book ''Surréalisme et sexualité'' (1971) inspired further important scholarship related to the marginalization of women in relation to "the avant-garde."This perspective was anticipated and cretiqed as misunderstanding surrealism's point in being a social critique and a reflection the individual's presuppositions so that they may be critically questioned.

Freudian

Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of Surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the Surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard Surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.

See also

Chicago Surrealist Group

Fantastic art

Neo-Fauvism

References

Bibliography

André Breton

''Manifestoes of Surrealism'' containing the first, second and introduction to a possible third manifesto, the novel ''The Soluble Fish'', and political aspects of the Surrealist movement. ISBN 0-472-17900-4 .

''What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton''. ISBN 0-87348-822-9 .

''Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism'' (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993). ISBN 1-56924-970-9.

''The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism'', reprinted in:

* Bonnet, Marguerite, ed. (1988). ''Oeuvres complètes'', 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Other sources

Alexandrian, Sarane. ''Surrealist Art'' London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.

Appollinaire, Guillaume 1917, 1991. Program note for ''Parade'', printed in ''Oeuvres en prose complètes'', 2:865-866, Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, eds. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Brotchie, Alastair and Gooding, Mel, eds. ''A Book of Surrealist Games'' Berkeley, CA: Shambhala, 1995. ISBN 1-57062-084-9.

Caws, Mary Ann ''Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology'' 2001, MIT Press.

Durozoi, Gerard, ''History of the Surrealist Movement'' Translated by Alison Anderson University of Chicago Press. 2004. ISBN 0-226-17411-5.

Flahutez, Fabrice, ''Nouveau Monde et Nouveau Mythe. Mutations du surréalisme de l'exil américain à l'écart absolu (1941–1965)'', Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2007.

Lewis, Helena. ''Dada Turns Red.'' Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Ednburgh Press, 1990.

_____. ''The Politics Of Surrealism'' 1988

Low Mary, Breá Juan, ''Red Spanish Notebook'', City Light Books, Sans Francisco, 1979, ISBN 087286-132-5

Melly, George ''Paris and the Surrealists'' Thames & Hudson. 1991.

Moebius, Stephan. ''Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie. Konstanz: UVK 2006. About the College of Sociology, its members and sociological impacts.

Nadeau, Maurice. ''History of Surrealism'' Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1989. ISBN 0-674-40345-2.

Richard Jean-Tristan. "Les structures inconscientes du signe pictural/Psychanalyse et surréalisme" (Unconscious structures of pictural sign), L'Harmattan ed., Paris (France), 1999

External links

André Breton writings

''Manifesto of Surrealism'' by André Breton. 1924.

''What is Surrealism?'' Lecture by Breton, Brussels 1934

Overview websites

Dutch Surrealism,

Timeline of Surrealism from Centre Pompidou.

Le Surréalisme

Surrealist.com, A general history of the art movement with artist biographies and art.

Surrealism and politics

Surrealist poetry

Surrealism in Poetry Holcombe, C. J.

A sample of French Surrealist poetry

Aimé Césaire and Surrealism

Category:Art movements

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Coordinates	9°1′48″N38°44′24″N
name	René Magritte
birth name	René François Ghislain Magritte
birth date	November 21, 1898
birth place	Lessines, Belgium
death date	August 15, 1967
death place	Brussels, Belgium
nationality	Belgian
field	Painter
movement	Surrealism
works	The Treachery of ImagesOn the Threshold of LibertyThe Son of ManThe Empty MaskThe Difficult CrossingThe Human ConditionNot to be ReproducedTime TransfixedElective AffinitiesThe PortraitGolcondaThe Mysteries of the HorizonThe Menaced Assassin
awards	}}

René François Ghislain Magritte[[#Notes|^[p] ]] (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His work challenges observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality.

Early life and career

Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant, and Régina (née Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magritte's early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte's paintings in 1927–1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including ''Les Amants''.

Magritte's earliest paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring. The paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger. Most of his works of this period are female nudes.

In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913. From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. In 1922–1923, he worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie le Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, ''The Lost Jockey'' (''Le jockey perdu''), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.

Galerie la Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magritte's contract income. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising. He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency which earned him a living wage.

Surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte, in the early stages of his career, to stay rent free in his London home and paint. James is featured in two of Magritte's pieces, ''Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle)'' and ''La Reproduction Interdite'', a painting also known as ''Not to be Reproduced''.

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. He briefly adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943–44, an interlude known as his "Renoir Period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment that came with living in German-occupied Belgium. In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto ''Surrealism in Full Sunlight''. During 1947–48, Magritte's "Vache Period", he painted in a provocative and crude Fauve style. During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos, Braques and Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul Magritte and fellow Surrealist and 'surrogate son' Marcel Mariën, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries. At the end of 1948, he returned to the style and themes of his prewar surrealistic art.

His work was exhibited in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.

Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967 in his own bed, and was interred in Schaerbeek Cemetery, Evere, Brussels.

Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. In 2005 he came 9th in the Walloon version of ''De Grootste Belg'' (''The Greatest Belgian''); in the Flemish version he was 18th.

Philosophical and artistic gestures

Magritte's work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, ''The Treachery of Images'' (''La trahison des images''), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an ''image'' of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally"—when Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco. Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these "Ceci n'est pas" works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.

Among Magritte's works are a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings. Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in his ''The Human Condition'' series (1933, 1935) or ''The Promenades of Euclid'' (1955) (wherein the spires of a castle are "painted" upon the ordinary streets which the canvas overlooks). In a letter to André Breton, he wrote of ''The Human Condition'' that it was irrelevant if the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, "but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room." The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif.

Magritte's style of surrealism is more representational than the "automatic" style of artists such as Joan Miró. Magritte's use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery. He described the act of painting as "the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry of this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new.”

René Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

Magritte's constant play with reality and illusion has been attributed to the early death of his mother. Psychoanalysts who have examined bereaved children have said that Magritte's back and forth play with reality and illusion reflects his "constant shifting back and forth from what he wishes—'mother is alive'—to what he knows—'mother is dead' ".

Artists influenced by Magritte

Contemporary artists have been greatly influenced by René Magritte's stimulating examination of the fickleness of images. Some artists who have been influenced by Magritte's works include John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Vija Celmins, Marcel Broodthaers, Jan Verdoodt, Martin Kippenberger and Storm Thorgerson. Some of the artists' works integrate direct references and others offer contemporary viewpoints on his abstract fixations.

Magritte's use of simple graphic and everyday imagery has been compared to that of the Pop artists. His influence in the development of Pop art has been widely recognized, although Magritte himself discounted the connection. He considered the Pop artists' representation of "the world as it is" as "their error", and contrasted their attention to the transitory with his concern for "the feeling for the real, insofar as it is permanent." The 2006–2007 LACMA exhibition “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images" examined the relationship between Magritte and contemporary art.

In popular culture

The 1960s brought a great increase in public awareness of Magritte's work. Examples include album covers such as ''Beck-Ola'' by The Jeff Beck Group (reproducing Magritte's ''The Listening Room''), Jackson Browne's 1974 album ''Late for the Sky'', with artwork inspired by Magritte's ''L'Empire des Lumières'', Oregon's album ''Out of the Woods'' referring to ''Carte Blanche'', and the Firesign Theatre's album ''Just Folks . . . A Firesign Chat'' based on ''The Mysteries of the Horizon''.

Tom Stoppard has written a surrealist play called ''After Magritte''.

Douglas Hofstadter's book ''Gödel, Escher, Bach'' uses Magritte works for many of its illustrations.

Paul Simon's song "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War", inspired by a photograph of Magritte by Lothar Wolleh, appears on the 1983 album ''Hearts and Bones''.

Magritte's imagery has inspired filmmakers ranging from the surrealist Marcel Mariën to mainstream directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicholas Roeg, and Terry Gilliam.

According to Ellen Burstyn, in the 1998 documentary ''The Fear of God: 25 Years of "The Exorcist"'', the iconic poster shot for the film ''The Exorcist'' was inspired by Magritte's ''L'Empire des Lumières''.

Magritte Museum

The Magritte Museum opened to the public on 30 May 2009 in Brussels. Housed in the five-level neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it displays some 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures including ''The Return'', ''Scheherazade'' and ''The Empire of Light''.

Another museum is located at rue Esseghem 135 in Brussels in Magritte's former home, where he lived with his wife from 1930 to 1954. A painting by Magritte was stolen from this museum on the morning of 24 September 2009 by two armed men. The robbery occurred just after 10 a.m., shortly after the museum opened. A man rang the doorbell, inquired if visiting hours had begun, and then pointed a gun at the museum attendant while an accomplice went inside. The thieves made museum workers and visitors kneel in a courtyard while they left on foot with a 1948 painting, ''Olympia'', a nude portrait of Magritte’s wife. The two men, who spoke English and French, set off an alarm when they broke a glass plate that protected the painting, but had already escaped by the time the police arrived. The stolen work is said to be worth about $1.1 million.

Selected list of works

1920 ''Landscape''

1922 ''The Station'' and ''L'Écuyère''

1923 ''Self-portrait'', ''Sixth Nocturne'', ''Georgette at the Piano'' and ''Donna''

1925 ''The Bather'' and ''The Window''

1926 ''The Lost Jockey'', ''The Mind of the Traveler'', ''Sensational News'', ''The Difficult Crossing'', ''The Vestal's Agony'', ''The Midnight Marriage'', ''The Musings of a Solitary Walker'', ''After the Water the Clouds'', ''Popular Panorama'', ''Landscape'' and ''The Encounter''

1927 ''Young Girl Eating a Bird'', ''The Oasis'' (started in 1925), ″Le Double Secret", ''The Meaning of Night'', ''Let Out of School'', ''The Man from the Sea'', ''The Tiredness of Life'', ''The Light-breaker'', ''A Passion for Light'', ''The Menaced Assassin'', ''Reckless Sleeper'', ''La Voleuse'', ''The Fast Hope'', ''L'Atlantide'' and ''The Muscles of the Sky''

1928 ''The Lining of Sleep'' (started in 1927), ''Intermission'' (started in 1927), ''The Flowers of the Abyss'', ''Discovery'', ''The Lovers I & II'', ''The Voice of Space'', ''The Daring Sleeper'', ''The Acrobat's Ideas'', ''The Automaton'', ''The Empty Mask'', ''Reckless Sleeper'', ''The Secret Life'' and ''Attempting the Impossible''

1929 ''The Treachery of Images'' (started in 1928), ''Threatening Weather'' and ''On the Threshold of Liberty''

1930 ''Pink Belles, Tattered Skies'', ''The Eternally Obvious'', ''The Lifeline'', ''The Annunciation'' and ''Celestial Perfections''

1931 ''The Voice of the Air'', ''Summer'' and ''The Giantess''

1932 ''The Universe Unmasked''

1933 ''Elective Affinities'', ''The Human Condition'' and ''The Unexpected Answer''

1934 ''The Rape''

1935 ''The Discovery of Fire'', ''The Human Condition'', ''Revolution'', ''Perpetual Motion'', ''Collective Invention'', ''The False Mirror'' and ''The Portrait''

1936 ''Surprise Answer'', ''Clairvoyance'', ''The Healer'', ''The Philosopher's Lamp'', ''Spiritual Exercises'', ''Portrait of Irène Hamoir'', ''La Méditation'' and ''Forbidden Literature''

1937 ''The Future of Statues'', ''The Black Flag'', ''Not to be Reproduced'', ''Portrait of Edward James'' and ''Portrait of Rena Schitz'', ''On the Threshold of Liberty''

1938 ''Time Transfixed'', ''The Domain of Arnheim'' and ''Steps of Summer''

1939 ''Victory''

1940 ''The Return'', ''The Wedding Breakfast'' and ''Les Grandes Espérances''

1941 ''The Break in the Clouds''

1942 ''Misses de L'Isle Adam'', ''L'Ile au Tréson'', ''Memory'', ''Black Magic'', ''Les compagnons de la peur'' and ''The Misanthropes''

1943 ''Universal Gravitation'' and ''Monsieur Ingres's Good Days''

1944 ''The Good Omens''

1945 ''Treasure Island'', ''Les Rencontres Naturelles'' and ''Black Magic''

1946 ''L'Intellience'' and ''Les Mille et une Nuits''

1947 ''La Philosophie dans le boudoir'', ''The Cicerone'', ''The Liberator'', ''The Fair Captive'', ''La Part du Feu'' and ''The Red Model''

1948 ''Blood Will Tell'', ''Memory'', ''The Mountain Dweller'', ''The Art of Life'', ''The Pebble'', '' The Lost Jockey'', ''God's Solon'', ''Shéhérazade'', ''L'Ellipse'' and ''Famine'' and ''The Taste of Sorrow''

1949 ''Megalomania'', ''Elementary Cosmogany'', and ''Perspective, the Balcony''

1950 ''Making an Entrance'', ''The Legend of the Centuries'', ''Towards Pleasure'', ''The Labors of Alexander'', ''The Empire of Light II'', ''The Fair Captive'' and ''The Art of Conversation''

1951 ''David's Madame Récamier'' (parodying the ''Portrait of Madame Récamier''), ''Pandora's Box'', ''The Song of the Violet'', ''The Spring Tide'' and ''The Smile''

1952 ''Personal Values'' and ''Le Sens de la Pudeur''

1953 ''Golconda'', ''The Listening Room'' and a fresco for the Knokke Casino

1954 ''The Invisible World'', ''The Explanation'' and ''The Empire of Light''

1955 ''Memory of a Journey'' and ''The Mysteries of the Horizon''

1956 ''The Sixteenth of September''

1957 ''The Fountain of Youth'' and ''The Enchanted Domain''

1958 ''The Golden Legend'', ''Hegel's Holiday'', ''The Banquet'' and ''The Familiar World''

1959 ''The Castle in the Pyrenees'', ''The Battle of the Argonne'', ''The Anniversary'', ''The Month of the Grape Harvest'' and ''The Glass Key''

1960 ''The Memoirs of a Saint''

1962 ''The Great Table'', ''The Healer'', ''Waste of Effort'', ''Mona Lisa'' (circa 1962) and ''L'embeillie'' (circa 1962)

1963 ''The Great Family'', ''The Open Air'', ''The Beautiful Season'', ''Princes of the Autumn'', ''Young Love'', ''La Recherche de la Vérité'' and ''The Telescope''

1964 ''Evening Falls'', ''The Great War'', ''The Son of Man'' and ''Song of Love''

1965 ''Carte Blanche'', ''The Thought Which Sees'', ''Ages Ago'' and ''The Beautiful Walk'' (circa 1965)

1966 ''The Shades'', ''The Happy Donor'', ''The Gold Ring'', ''The Pleasant Truth'', ''The Two Mysteries'', and ''The Mysteries of the Horizon''

1967 ''Les Grâces Naturelles'', ''La Géante'', ''The Blank Page'', ''Good Connections'', ''The Art of Living'' and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte's previous works.

See also

List of Belgian painters

Notes

:[p] - The name ''René Magritte'' is pronounced as "Ruh-nay Ma-greet".

References

External links

Foundation Magritte

The biography and works of Rene Magritte

René Magritte Museum in Brussels

Magritte at Artcyclopedia

Rene Magritte: The Pleasure Principle - Exhibition at Tate Liverpool, UK 2011

University of Iowa Art Gallery

Musée Magritte Museum at Brussels

A visit to the Musée Magritte Museum

Patricia Allmer, "La Reproduction Interdite: René Magritte and Forgery" in ''Papers of Surrealism'', Issue 5, Spring 2007.

	:*	:*

Category:1898 births Category:1967 deaths Category:People from Lessines Category:Belgian artists Category:Belgian painters Category:Cancer deaths in Belgium Category:Deaths from pancreatic cancer Category:Modern painters Category:Surrealism Category:Surrealist artists Category:Walloon people Category:20th-century painters

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Coordinates	9°1′48″N38°44′24″N
name	Max Ernst
birth date	April 02, 1891
birth place	Brühl, Germany
death date	April 01, 1976
death place	Paris, France
nationality	German
field	painting, sculpture, poetry
movement	Dada, Surrealism
awards	}}

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Biography

Early life

Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp Ernst was a teacher of the deaf and dumb and an amateur painter. A devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian, he inspired in his son a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max Ernst to take up painting himself. In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting this year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his ''Die Rheinischen Expressionisten'' group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work was exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.

In 1914 Ernst met Hans Arp in Cologne. The two soon became friends and their relationship lasted for fifty years. After Ernst completed his studies in the summer, his life was interrupted by World War I. Ernst was drafted and served both on the Western and the Eastern front. Such was the devastating effect of the war on the artist that in his autobiography he referred to his time in the army thus: "On the first of August 1914 M[ax].E[rnst]. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." However, for a brief period on the Western front, Ernst's position was charting maps, which allowed him to continue painting. Several German Expressionist painters died in action during the war, among them Macke and Franz Marc.

Dada and surrealism

Ernst was demobilized in 1918 and returned to Cologne. He soon married art history student Luise Straus, whom he met in 1914. Next year Ernst visited Paul Klee in Munich and studied paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, which left a deep impression on him. The same year, inspired partly by de Chirico and partly by studying mail-order catalogues, teaching-aide manuals, and similar sources, he produced his first collages (notably ''Fiat modes'', a portfolio of lithographs), a technique which would come to dominate his artistic pursuits in the years to come. Also in 1919 Ernst, social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld, and a number of their friends and colleagues founded the Cologne Dada group. In 1919–20 Ernst and Baargeld published various short-lived magazines such as ''Der Strom'' and ''die schammade'' and organized Dada exhibitions.

Ernst's son Ulrich 'Jimmy' Ernst was born on 24 June 1920. He went on to become a painter like his father, but Ernst's marriage to Luise was short-lived. In 1921 he met Paul Éluard, who became a close lifelong friend. Éluard bought two of Ernst's paintings (''Celebes'' and ''Oedipus Rex'') and selected six collages to illustrate his poetry collection ''Répétitions''. A year later the two collaborated on ''Les malheurs des immortels'', and then, with André Breton whom Ernst met in 1921, on the magazine ''Litterature''. In 1922, unable to secure the necessary papers, Ernst entered France illegally and settled into a ménage à trois with the Éluards in Paris suburb Saint-Brice, leaving behind his wife and son. During his first two years in Paris Ernst took various odd jobs to make a living and continued to paint. In 1923 the Éluards moved to a new home in Eaubonne, near Paris, where Ernst painted numerous murals. The same year his works were exhibited at ''Salon des Indépendants''.

Although apparently accepting the ménage à trois at first, Éluard eventually became more concerned about the affair. In 1924 he abruptly left, first for Monaco, and then for Saigon, Vietnam. He soon asked his wife and Max Ernst to join him; both had to sell numerous paintings to finance the trip. Ernst went to Düsseldorf and sold a large number of his works to a longtime friend, Johanna Ey, owner of gallery ''Das Junge Rheinland''. After a brief time together in Saigon, the trio decided that Gala would remain with Paul. The Éluards returned to Eaubonne in early September, while Ernst followed them some months later, after exploring more of South-East Asia. He returned to Paris in late 1924 and soon signed a contract with Jacques Viot that allowed him to paint full time. In 1925 Ernst established a studio at 22, rue Touralque.

Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage (see Surrealist techniques), which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images. He also created another technique called 'grattage' in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He uses this technique in his famous painting ''Forest and Dove'' (as shown at the Tate Modern).

The next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered grattage in which he troweled pigment from his canvases. He also explored with the technique of decalcomania which involves pressing paint between two surfaces.

Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested that this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said that one night when he was young he woke up and found that his beloved bird had died, and a few minutes later his father announced that his sister was born. Loplop often appeared in collages of other artists' work, such as ''Loplop presents André Breton''. Ernst drew a great deal of controversy with his 1926 painting ''The Virgin Chastises the infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter''. In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and it is thought his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of ''The Kiss'' and other works of this year. In 1930, he appeared in the film ''L'Âge d'Or'', directed by self-identifying Surrealist Luis Buñuel. Ernst began to make sculpture in 1934, and spent time with Alberto Giacometti. In 1938, the American heiress and artistic patron Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Max Ernst's works which she displayed in her new museum in London. Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim were also married to one another from 1942 to 1946.

World War II and later life

In 1938 he was interned in Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, along with fellow surrealist, Hans Bellmer, who had recently emigrated to Paris on the outbreak of World War II. Thanks to the intercession of Paul Éluard and other friends, including the journalist Varian Fry, he was discharged a few weeks later. Soon after the Nazi occupation of France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Guggenheim. He left behind his lover, Leonora Carrington, and she suffered a major mental breakdown. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married the following year. Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism.

His marriage to Guggenheim did not last, and in Beverly Hills, California in October 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning. The couple first made their home in Sedona, Arizona. In 1948 Ernst wrote the treatise ''Beyond Painting''. As a result of the publicity, he began to achieve financial success.

In 1953 he and Tanning moved to a small town in the south of France where he continued to work. The City, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works. In 1966 he created a chess set made of glass which he named "Immortel"; it has been described by the poet André Verdet as "a masterpiece of bewitching magic, worthy of a Maya palace or the residence of a Pharaon".

Ernst died on 1 April 1976 in Paris. He was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Selected works

Paintings

Early works

''Aquis Submersus'' (1919)

''Trophy, Hypertrophied'' (1919)

''Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person'' (1919–1920)

''Murdering Airplane'' (1920)

''The Hat Makes the Man'' (1920)

''Celebes'' (1921)

''Oedipus Rex'' (1922)

First French period

''Pieta or Revolution by Night'' (1923)

''Saint Cecilia'' (1923)

''The Wavering Woman'' (1923)

''Ubu Imperator'' (1923)

''Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale'' (1924)

''Woman, Old Man and Flower'' (1924)

''Paris Dream'' (1924–25)

''The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist'' (1926)

''Forest'' series, e.g. ''Forest and Dove'' (1927), ''The Wood'' (1927)

''Loplop'' series, e.g. ''Loplop Introduces Loplop'' (1930), ''Loplop Introduces a Young Girl'' (1930)

''City'' series, e.g. ''Petrified City'' (1933), ''Entire City'' (1935–36, two versions)

''Garden Aeroplane Trap'' series (1935–36)

''The Joy of Living'' (1936)

''The Fascinating Cypress'' (1940)

''The Robing of the Bride'' (1940)

American period

''Totem and Taboo'' (1941)

''Marlene'' (1941)

''Napoleon in the Wilderness'' (1941)

''Day and Night'' (1941–42)

''The Antipope '' (1942)

''Europe After the Rain II'' (1940–42)

''Surrealism and Painting'' (1942)

''Vox Angelica'' (1943)

''Everyone Here Speaks Latin'' (1943)

''Painting for Young People'' (1943)

''The Eye of Silence'' (1944)

''Dream and Revolution'' (1945)

''The Phases of the Night'' (1946)

''Design In Nature'' (1947)

''Inspired Hill'' (1950)

''Colorado of Medusa, Color-Raft of Medusa'' (1953)

Second French period

''Mundus est fabula'' (1959)

''The Garden of France'' (1962)

''The Sky Marries the Earth'' (1964)

''The World of the Naive'' (1965)

''Ubu, Father and Son'' (1966)

''Birth of a Galaxy'' (1969)

Collages, lithographs, drawings, illustrations, etc.

''Fiat modes'' (1919, portfolio of lithographs)

Illustrations for books by Paul Éluard: ''Répétitions'' (1921), ''Les malheurs des immortels'' (1922), ''Au défaut du silence'' (1925)

''Histoire Naturelle'' (1926, frottage drawings)

''La femme 100 têtes'' (1929, graphic novel)

''Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel'' (1930, graphic novel)

''Une Semaine de Bonté'' (1934, graphic novel)

''Paramythes'' (1949, collages with poems)

Illustrations for editions of works by Lewis Carroll: ''Symbolic Logic'' (1966, under the title ''Logique sans peine''), ''The Hunting of the Snark'' (1968), and ''Lewis Carrols Wunderhorn'' (1970, an anthology of texts)

''Aux petits agneaux'' (1971, lithographs)

''Paysage marin avec capucin'' (1972, illustrated book with essays by various authors)

''Oiseaux en peril'' (1975, etchings with aquatint in colors; published posthumously)

Sculpture

''Bird'' (c. 1924)

''Oedipus'' (1934, two versions)

''Moonmad'' (1944)

''An Anxious Friend'' (1944)

''Capricorn'' (1948)

''Two and Two Make One'' (1956)

''Immortel'' (1966–67)

Ernst in modern culture

Many of Ernst's works from ''Une Semaine de Bonté'' are used in albums by American rock group The Mars Volta. Also, ''Barefoot In The Head'', a collaboration between guitarist Thurston Moore and saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich of Borbetomagus, features a collage from this same book.

The American rock group Mission of Burma titled two songs after the artist: "Max Ernst" was the b-side of their first 1978 single (now included on the CD of ''Signals, Calls and Marches''), mentioning two of Ernst's paintings (''The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus'' and ''Garden Airplane-Trap'') and ending with the words "Dada dada dada ..." repeated many times and distorted via tape loop; their 2002 album ''OnOffOn'' features "Max Ernst's Dream".

The writer J. G. Ballard makes numerous references to the art works of Max Ernst in his breakthrough novel ''The Drowned World'' (1962) and the experimental collection of short stories ''The Atrocity Exhibition'' (1970).

''Europe After the Rain'' was used by musician John Foxx as the title for the opening track of his 1981 album ''The Garden''.

Legacy

Max Ernst's life and career are the subject of Peter Schamoni's 1991 documentary ''Max Ernst''. Dedicated to the art historian Werner Spies, it was assembled from interviews with Ernst, stills of his paintings and sculptures, and the memoirs of his wife Dorothea Tanning and son Jimmy. The 101-minute German film was released on DVD with English subtitles by Image Entertainment.

In 2005, "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and included works such as ''Celebes'' (1921), ''Ubu Imperator'' (1923), and ''Fireside Angel'' (1937), which is one of the few definitively political pieces and is sub-titled ''The Triumph of Surrealism'' depicting a raging bird-like creature that symbolizes the wave of fascism that took over Europe. The exhibition also includes Ernst's works that experiment with free association writing and the techniques of frottage, created from a rubbing from a textured surface; grattage, involving scratching at the surface of a painting; and decalcomania, which involves altering a wet painting by pressing a second surface against it and taking it away.

Ernst's son Jimmy, a well known German/American abstract expressionist painter, who lived on the south shore of Long Island, died in 1984. His memoirs, ''A Not-So-Still Life'', were published shortly before his death. His grandson Eric and granddaughter Amy are both artists and writers.

Gallery

References

Bibliography

Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald (eds.), ''Max Ernst: A Retrospective''. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Catalogue of exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: ''Max Ernst: a retrospective''

John Russell. ''Max Ernst: life and work'' (New York, H.N. Abrams, 1967) OCLC 2034599

Bodley Gallery (New York, N.Y.) Max Ernst : paintings, collages, drawings, sculpture : October 30-November 25, 1961 : Bodley Gallery, 223 East 60, New York (exhibition catalogue and commentary; published by the gallery, 1961) OCLC 54157692

''Max Ernst Books and Graphic Works''. Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, 1977.

External links

Works in the National Galleries of Scotland

Max-Ernst Museum Brühl

Max Ernst works and biography Olga's Gallery

Max Ernst works and biography Galerie Ludorff

Max Ernst gallery Ten Dreams

"Max Ernst, will-o'-the-wisp" Max Ernst explained to younger generation, Gilbert-Rts

Max Ernst facts Artfacts.Net

Max Ernst MasterPiece: "Immortel" Maxernstmasterpiece.com

Max Ernst Exposition Max Ernst Exposition on the web

Max-Ernst Biography

Category:1891 births Category:1976 deaths Category:German artists Category:German painters Category:Modern painters Category:Modern sculptors Category:Dada Category:Surrealist artists Category:University of Bonn alumni Category:People from Brühl Category:People from the Rhine Province Category:People from Sedona, Arizona Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery

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Coordinates	9°1′48″N38°44′24″N
name	Bill Bailey
birth name	Mark Bailey
birth date	January 13, 1964
birth place	Bath, Somerset, England
active	1989–present
genre	Surreal humour, Musical comedy
spouse	Kristin Bailey (1998–present)
religion	Pagan
website
notable work	''Black Books''''Never Mind the Buzzcocks''''Hot Fuzz''
notable role	Manny Biancoin ''Black Books''Bilboin ''Spaced'' }}

Bill Bailey (born Mark Bailey; 13 January, 1964) is an English comedian, musician and actor. As well as his extensive stand-up work, Bailey is well known for his appearances on ''Black Books'', ''Never Mind the Buzzcocks'', ''Have I Got News for You'', and ''QI''.

Bailey was listed by ''The Observer'' as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy in 2003. In 2007 and again in 2010, he was voted the 7th greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups. Bill Bailey is a patron of International Animal Rescue.

Personal life

Bailey was born in Bath, Somerset and spent the majority of his childhood in Keynsham, a town situated between Bath and Bristol in the West of England. His father was a medical practitioner and his mother was a hospital ward sister. His maternal grandparents lived in an annexe, built on the side of the house by his maternal grandfather who was a stonemason and builder. Two rooms at the front of the family house were for his father's surgery.

Bailey was educated at King Edward's School, an independent school in Bath where he was initially an academic pupil winning most of the prizes. However, at about the age of 15 years, he started to become distracted from school work when he realised the thrill of performance as a member of a school band called Behind Closed Doors, which played mostly original work. He was the only pupil at his school to study A-level music and he passed with an A grade. He also claims to have been good at sport (captain of KES 2nd XI cricket team 1982), which often surprised his teachers. He would often combine the two by leading the singing on the long coach trip back from away rugby fixtures. It was here that he was given his nickname Bill by his music teacher, Ian Phipps, for being able to play the song "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" so well on the guitar.

He started an English degree at Westfield College of the University of London but left after a year.

He spent his early years listening to Monty Python records, and rehearsing with a band called the "Famous Five", who he himself confesses were very bad but still much better than him and who actually only had four members. However, he is a classically trained musician and received an Associateship Diploma from the London College of Music as well as being made an honorary member of the Society of Crematorium Organists. Despite this, he has said that he always had the temptation to be silly with music, a trait that influences his stand-up shows.

Bailey often mythologises his early years in his stand-up. In his show ''Bewilderness'', he claims to have attended Bovington Gurney School of Performing Arts and Owl Sanctuary. He talks about a succession of jobs he had before becoming a comedian, including lounge pianist, crematorium organist, door-to-door door-salesman and accompanist for a mind-reading dog. A clip of Bailey's appearance in the dog's routine was shown during his ''Room 101'' appearance. He also is self-deprecating about his appearance, suggesting he is so hairy that he is part troll, or that his hair or beard is a small animal named Lionel whom he has trained to sit 'very very still.'

Bailey also talks about his role as a "Disenfranchised Owl" in an experimental Welsh theatre troupe. Other acting roles included a part in a Workers' Revolutionary Party stage production called ''The Printers'', which also featured Vanessa Redgrave and Frances de la Tour. His trivia page on IMDb also claims that he was awarded Best Actor in the 1986 Institut Français awards.

Bailey married Kristin in 1998. An avid ''Star Trek'' fan, he named his son (born 2003) not after the'' Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'' character Dax as is often reported, but after a childhood friend, and often refers to himself as a Klingon (once claiming during his "Part Troll" tour that his ear-mounted microphone made him resemble "a wizard in a call centre" and "a Klingon motivational speaker").

He currently lives in Hammersmith and supports Queens Park Rangers. In 2010, Bailey endorsed the Labour Party in the upcoming General Election, appearing in the party's fifth party election broadcast of the 2010 campaign. He is also an outspoken feminist and supporter of the Fawcett Society.

Career

Early stand-up

Bailey began touring the country with other comedians such as Mark Lamarr. In 1984 he formed a double act, the Rubber Bishops, with Toby Longworth (a former fellow pupil at King Edward's Bath). They achieved a certain amount of success on the club circuit, partly due to their rigorous schedule – sometimes as many as three or four gigs a night. It was here that Bailey began developing his own unique style, mixing in musical parodies with deconstructions of or variations on traditional jokes ("How many amoebas does it take to change a lightbulb? One, no two! No four! No eight..."). According to comedy folklore, after a reviewer once criticised his act for its lack of jokes, Bailey returned the following night, at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh, to perform a set composed entirely of punchlines. Toby left to join the RSC in 1989 and was replaced by Martin Stubbs.

Stubbs later quit to pursue a more serious career, and in 1994 Bailey performed ''Rock'' at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Sean Lock, a show about an ageing rockstar and his roadie, script-edited by comedy writer Jim Miller. It was later serialised for the Mark Radcliffe show on BBC Radio 1. However, the show's attendances were not impressive and on one occasion the only person in the audience was comedian Dominic Holland. Bailey almost gave up comedy to take up a telesales job.

He persevered, however, and went solo the next year with the one man show ''Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam''. The show was very well received and led to a recording at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London which was broadcast in 1997 on Channel 4 as a one-hour special called ''Bill Bailey Live''. It was not until 2005 that this was released in DVD uncut and under its original title. It marked the first time that Bailey had been able to tie together his music and post-modern gags with the whimsical rambling style he is now known for.

After supporting Donna McPhail in 1995 and winning a ''Time Out'' award, he returned to Edinburgh in 1996 with a critically acclaimed show that was nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award. Amongst the other nominees was future ''Black Books'' co-star Dylan Moran, who narrowly beat him in the closest vote in the award's history.

Bailey won the Best Live Stand-Up award at the British Comedy Awards, 1999.

Television

Though he didn't win the Perrier in 1996, the nomination was enough to get him noticed, and in 1998 the BBC gave him his own television show, ''Is It Bill Bailey?''

This was not Bailey's first foray into television. His debut was on the children's TV show ''Motormouth'' in the late 1980s, playing piano for a mind-reading dog. The trick went hilariously wrong, and Bailey reminisced about the experience on the BBC show ''Room 101'' with Paul Merton in 2000. In 1991, he was appearing in stand-up shows such as ''The Happening'', ''Packing Them In'', ''The Stand Up Show'', and ''The Comedy Store''. He also appeared as captain on two panel games, an ITV music quiz pilot called ''Pop Dogs'', and the poorly received Channel 4 science fiction quiz show, ''Space Cadets''. However ''Is it Bill Bailey?'' was the first time he had written and presented his own show.

With his star on the rise and gaining public recognition, over the next few years, Bailey made well received guest appearances on shows such as ''Have I Got News For You'', ''World Cup Comedy'', ''Room 101'', ''Des O'Connor Tonight'', ''Coast to Coast'' and three episodes of off-beat Channel 4 sitcom ''Spaced'', in which he played comic-shop manager Bilbo Bagshot.

In 1998, Dylan Moran approached him with the pilot script for ''Black Books'', a Channel 4 sitcom about a grumpy bookshop owner, his put-upon assistant, and their neurotic female friend. It was commissioned in 2000, and Bailey took the part of the assistant Manny Bianco, with Moran playing the owner Bernard, and Tamsin Greig the friend, Fran. Three series of six episodes were made, building up a large cult fanbase, providing the public awareness on which Bailey would build a successful national tour in 2001.

When Sean Hughes left his long-term role as a team captain on ''Never Mind the Buzzcocks'' in 2002, Bailey became his successor. His style quickly blended into the show, possibly helped by his background in music. He soon developed a rapport of sorts with host Mark Lamarr, who continually teased him about his looks and his pre-occupation with woodland animals. It was announced on 18 September 2008 that Bill would be leaving the series and be replaced by a series of guest captains including Jack Dee and Dermot O'Leary. Whilst touring in 2009, Bailey joked that his main reason for leaving the show was a lack of desire to continue humming Britney Spears' Toxic to little known figures in the indie music scene. It was during this time that he also left his position as "curator" of The Museum of Curiosity, and declared his intention to "retire" from panel games, although he has since appeared on QI many more times and hosted Have I Got News For You.

Bailey has appeared frequently on the intellectual panel game ''QI'' since it began in 2003, appearing alongside host Stephen Fry and regular panellist Alan Davies. Other television appearances include a cameo role in Alan Davies' drama series ''Jonathan Creek'' as failing street magician Kenny Starkiss and obsessed guitar teacher in the "Holiday" episode of Sean Lock's ''Fifteen Storeys High''. He later appeared with Lock again as a guest on his show ''TV Heaven, Telly Hell''. He has also appeared twice on ''Friday Night with Jonathan Ross''. Bill also hosted his own show "Comic's Choice", which aired in 2011.

Bailey also presented ''Wild Thing I Love You'' which began on Channel 4 on 15 October 2006. The series focuses on the protection of Britain's wild animals, and has included rehoming badgers, owls, and water voles.

Bailey has most recently appeared in the second series of the E4 teenage "dramedy" ''Skins'' playing Maxxie's Dad, Walter Oliver. In episode 1, Walter struggles with his son's desire to be a dancer, instead wishing him to become a builder, which is what he himself does for a living. Walter is married to Jackie, played by Fiona Allen.

Bailey appeared on the first episode of Grand Designs Live on 4 May 2008, helping Kevin McCloud build his eco-friendly home. In 2009 Bailey appeared in the BBC show "Hustle" as the Character "Cyclops", a side-line character. In the Autumn of 2009, Bailey presented Bill Bailey's Birdwatching Bonanza.

As a continuation of Bailey's recent foray into natural history, he presented ITV1's half-hour wildlife mini-series ''Baboons With Bill Bailey''. The series was filmed in Cape Town and spanned 8 episodes, with exclusive content available on itvWILD.

International tours

In 2001, Bailey began touring the globe with ''Bewilderness'', which became a huge success. A recording of a performance in Swansea was released on DVD the same year, and the show was broadcast on Channel 4 that Christmas. A modified version of it also proved successful in America, and in 2002 Bill released a CD of a recording at the WestBeth Theatre in New York. The show contained all his trademarks, popular music parodies (such as Unisex Chip Shop, a Billy Bragg tribute which he actually performed with Billy Bragg at the 2005 Glastonbury Festival), "three men in a pub" jokes (including one in the style of Geoffrey Chaucer) and deconstructions of television themes such as ''Countdown'' and ''The Magic Roundabout''. A 'Bewilderness' CD was sold outside gigs, which was actually just a mixture of studio recordings of songs and monologues Bill had performed in the past – it was later released in shops as ''Bill Bailey: The Ultimate Collection... Ever!''. That same year he also presented a Channel 4 countdown, ''Top Ten Prog Rock''.

Bailey premiered his show ''Part Troll'' at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A critical and commercial success, he then transferred it to the West End where tickets sold out in under 24 hours, and new dates had to be added. Since then he has toured it all over the UK as well as in America, Australia and New Zealand. The show marked the first time Bailey had really tackled political material, as he expanded on subjects such as the war on Iraq, which he had only touched upon before in his ''Bewilderness New York'' show. He also talks extensively on drugs, at one point asking the audience to name different ways of baking cannabis. A DVD was released in 2004.

2005 finally saw the release of his 1995 show ''Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam''. The 2-disc set also contained a director's cut of ''Bewilderness'', which featured a routine on Stephen Hawking's ''A Brief History of Time'' not seen in the original version.

Bailey performed at show at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe entitled "Steampunk". It looked set to become the fastest selling fringe show ever (beating the record Bailey set with The Odd Couple in 2005). But a ticketing mix-up forced the last 10% of tickets to be purchased in person from the venue rather than pre-booked, meaning the venue filled at a slower overall rate than it should have.

Bailey appeared at the Beautiful Days festival in August 2007. The UK leg of the ''Tinselworm'' tour enjoyed 3 sell-out nights at the MEN Arena in Manchester, Europe's largest indoor arena, and culminated with a sell-out performance at Wembley Arena.

Early in 2007, a petition was started to express fans' wishes to see him cast as a dwarf in the 2010 film ''The Hobbit'', after his stand-up routine mentioned auditioning for Gimli in ''The Lord of the Rings''. The petition reached its goal in the early days of January, and was sent to the producers. It was hoped that as the Tinselworm tour took him to Wellington in New Zealand where the film is in pre-production, that he would be able to audition.

Bill Bailey's most recent tour, titled ''Dandelion Mind'', was released on DVD on 22 November 2010.

Other appearances

2000

A small role in British comedy film ''Saving Grace''

2001

19 July: Panelist in Radio 4's show ''The 99p Challenge''

2002

Voice for a BMW Mini advertising campaign

Writer and performer for a series of British Airways adverts in which, through the use of music, he took a humorous look at several locations around the world

Guest panellist on BBC Radio show ''I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue''

2003

Juror No. 4 in ''Twelve Angry Men'', directed by Guy Masterson for the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Panelist on Radio 4's show ''Just a Minute'' (twice)

4 February: Panelist (for a second time) on Radio 4's show ''The 99p Challenge''

21 October: Presented ''Good Vibrations: The History of the Theremin'' on Radio 4

2005

Voice of the sperm whale in the 2005 film ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''

Co-starred as Oscar in ''The Odd Couple'' (alongside Alan Davies), directed by Guy Masterson for the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

One of the acts in the Birmingham show "Jasper Carrott's Rock with Laughter", alongside other performers including Bonnie Tyler, Lenny Henry, Bobby Davro and the Lord of the Dance troupe

Returned to Radio 4's ''Just a Minute'' for a third show as a panellist

2006

15 March: Interviewed by Lenny Henry for BBC Radio 4 show ''Chain Reaction''

22 March: Returned to ''Chain Reaction'' to interview Simon Pegg

2007

A minor part in Simon Pegg's and Edgar Wright's film ''Hot Fuzz'', as a pair of desk sergeant twins. (Bailey had originally meant to also appear in Pegg and Wright's earlier film, ''Shaun of the Dead''. but the commentary included with the DVD of that movie explains that he was busy with other commitments at the time.)

February: Organised, produced, and starred in West End show Pinter's People, a collection of sketches by playwright Harold Pinter. The show also starred Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips and Geraldine McNulty

March: Appeared at the International Human Beatbox Convention at the South Bank Centre in London, introducing Shlomo to the stage for the climax of the concert, as well as showing off his own beatboxing

4 May: Guest presenter for an episode of BBC One's ''Have I Got News for You'' (a role he returned to on 9 May 2008)

July: Narrator for 'Nessy Tales', a series of animated reading books for dyslexic children

2008

Guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs

February: Co-host of the first series of BBC Radio 4's panel show ''The Museum of Curiosity''

9 May: Guest presenter for an episode of BBC One's ''Have I Got News for You''

9 June: Guest on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Later that day, appeared as Rushton in the first episode of an adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists on the same station 7 September: Guest on live Australian TV show 'Rove'. In a questionnaire to win in 20 seconds, host Rove McManus asked his usual question, "Who would you turn gay for?". Bailey replied, "The pope" September: One of the hosts of the ''So You Think You're Funny'' comedy gala at the ''Edinburgh Festival Fringe''

11 October: Guest on BBC Radio 4's ''Loose Ends''

12 November: Performed for "We Are Most Amused", a special comedy performance to celebrate the 60th birthday of Prince Charles

2010

30 March: took part in ''Channel 4's Comedy Gala'', a benefit show held in aid of Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, filmed live at the O2 Arena in London.

27 June: appeared on Top Gear's ''Star in a Reasonably Priced Car'', while impersonating Angelina Jolie. He finished with a time of 1:50.8 in the Kia Cee'd.

28 September: the first guest on new ABC TV conversation program ''A Quiet Word With ...''.

Music

Bailey is a talented pianist and guitarist, and has perfect pitch; of this he has said }} His stand-up routines often feature music from genres such as jazz, rock (most notably prog rock from the early seventies), drum'n'bass, rave and classical, usually for comic value. Favourite instruments include the keyboard, guitar, theremin, kazoo and bongos. He also mentioned in an interview that he has achieved Grade 6 Clarinet. He was part of punk band Beergut 100, which he founded in 1995 with comedy writer Jim Miller and also featured Martin Trenaman and Phil Whelans, with Kevin Eldon as lead singer. The band performed at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Trenaman and Welans had previously appeared in ''Cosmic Jam'' under the name "The Stan Ellis Experiment", and Trenaman and Eldon later featured with John Moloney in the Kraftwerk homage "Das Hokey Kokey" on the ''Part Troll'' tour. Bill claims that he and the three other performers are a Kraftwerk tribute band called ''Augenblick''. To mark the final gig of the ''Part Troll'' tour on 1 January 2005 the band reappeared on stage after the "Das Hokey Kokey" joke to play an hour-long encore of music.

In February 2007, Bill appeared on two occasions with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Anne Dudley in a show entitled ''Cosmic Shindig''. Performed in The Colosseum in Watford on 24 February and in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 26 February, the show contained orchestrally accompanied versions of many of Bill's previously performed songs, an exploration of the instruments of the orchestra and a number of new pieces of music. The Queen Elizabeth Hall performance was aired on BBC Radio 3 on 16 March 2007 as a part of Comic Relief 2007.

Bill had planned to put himself forward as Britain's Eurovision entry in 2008, as a result of several fan petitions encouraging him to do so.

In October 2008 he performed ''Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra'' at the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Anne Dudley.

In 2009, Bailey presented a project about the explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, in the form of an Indonesian travelogue. Bailey said in an interview that Wallace had been "airbrushed out of history", and that he feels a "real affinity" with him.

In November 2009 he was a guest on ''Private Passions'', the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.

In July 2011, Bailey performed at the Sonisphere Festival in Knebworth, headlining the Saturn Stage.

Tours

''Cosmic Jam'' (1995)

''Bewilderness'' (2001)

''Part Troll'' (2004)

''Steampunk'' (2006) (Edinburgh Festival)

''Tinselworm'' (2008)

''Bill Bailey Live'' (2008–09) (Theatre Tour with Some Material from Tinselworm, but Mostly New Material)

''Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra'' (2009)

''Dandelion Mind'' (2010)

DVD releases

!Title	!Released	!Notes
''Bewilderness''	12 November 2001
''Part Troll''	22 November 2004	Live at London's HMV Hammersmith Apollo
''Cosmic Jam''	7 November 2005	Live at London's Bloomsbury Theatre
''Tinselworm''	10 November 2008	Live at London's Wembley Arena
''Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra''	23 November 2009	Live at London's Royal Albert Hall
''Dandelion Mind''	22 November 2010

Filmography

''The James Whale Radio Show (TV series)'' (circa 1990) (Guest)

''Blue Heaven (Channel 4 TV series)'' (1994)

''Asylum'' (1996)

''Space Cadets'' (1997) (Regular team captain)

''Is It Bill Bailey?'' (1998)

''Spaced'' (1999–2001)

''Have I Got News for You'' (guest 1999, 2001, 2005; guest presenter 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011)

''Saving Grace'' (2000)

''Maid Marian and her Merry Men (1992). Cameo court jester to King John

''Black Books'' (2000–2004)

''Jonathan Creek''

* "Satan's Chimney" (2001)

* "The Tailor's Dummy" (2003)

''Wild West'' (2002–2004)

''Never Mind the Buzzcocks'' (2002–2008) (Regular team captain)

''QI'' (2003–present) (Frequent guest)

"15 Storeys High" – "The Holiday" (2004)

''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (2005) (Voice of the Sperm Whale)

''The Libertine'' (Small cameo role as advisor to Charles II of England).

''Wild Thing I Love You'' (2006) (Presenter)

''Top Gear (A Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car)

''Hot Fuzz'' (2007)

''Run Fatboy Run'' (2007) (Cameo)

''Skins'' (2008)

''Love Soup'' (2008)

''We Are Most Amused'' (2008) (''One-off special'')

''Hustle''

* "Return of the Prodigal" (2009)

* "Diamond Seeker" (2009)

''Steve's World'' (2009)

''Burke and Hare'' (2010)

''Bill Bailey's Bird Watching Bonanza'' (2010)

''Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang'' (2010)

''Talkin' 'bout Your Generation'' (2010); one episode

''Chalet Girl'' (2011)

References

External links

.

Bill Bailey on Chortle.

Category:1965 births Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:20th-century writers Category:21st-century writers Category:Alumni of the Royal Academy of Music Category:Alumni of Westfield College Category:English buskers Category:English comedians Category:English comedy musicians Category:English composers Category:English film actors Category:English guitarists Category:English stand-up comedians Category:English television actors Category:English television writers Category:Living people Category:Never Mind the Buzzcocks Category:People from Bath, Somerset Category:People from Keynsham Category:People educated at King Edward's School, Bath

cy:Bill Bailey fr:Bill Bailey ga:Bill Bailey nl:Bill Bailey no:Bill Bailey ru:Бэйли, Билл (комедиант) simple:Bill Bailey fi:Bill Bailey sv:Bill Bailey

Coordinates	9°1′48″N38°44′24″N
name	Salvador Dalí
birth name	Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech
birth date	May 11, 1904
birth place	Figueres, Catalonia, Spain
death date	January 23, 1989
death place	Figueres, Catalonia, Spain
nationality	Spanish
religion	Roman Catholic
field	Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Writing, Film
training	San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid
movement	Cubism, Dada, Surrealism
works	''The Persistence of Memory'' (1931)''Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment'', (1935)''Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)'' (1936)''Swans Reflecting Elephants'' (1937)''Ballerina in a Death's Head'' (1939)''Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening'' (1944) ''The Temptation of St. Anthony'' (1946)''Galatea of the Spheres'' (1952)''Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)'' (1954)
awards	}}

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí (), was a prominent 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. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem and to the irritation of his critics.

Biography

Early life

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 11, 1904 at 8:45 am GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, ''"...[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections."'' He ''"was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."'' His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.

Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death ''"was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul."'' After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

Madrid and Paris

In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7¾ in.) tall, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy man. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the poet's sexual advances.

However it was his paintings in which he experimented with Cubism that earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of these early works, Dalí probably did not completely understand the Cubist movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life.

Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams when he was accused of starting an unrest. His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his realistic ''Basket of Bread'', painted in 1926. That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan Miró. As he developed his own style over the next few years Dalí made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró.

Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic, to the most cutting-edge avant garde. His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez. He used both classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez. The moustache became an iconic trademark of his appearance for the rest of his life.

1929 through World War II

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the short film (''An Andalusian Dog''). His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also, in August 1929, Dalí met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.

Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait."

Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set foot in Cadaquès again. The following summer, Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea.

In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, ''The Persistence of Memory'', which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by ants.

Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The exhibition in New York of Dalí's works, including ''Persistence of Memory'', created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere. In that year, Dalí and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by heiress Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him about his apology for a surrealist act.

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." Dalí insisted that surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism. Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism."

In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled , was delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."

Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film ''Rose Hobart'' at Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dalí became famous for another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to take place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring Dalí's work. Dalí was in the audience at the screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made,” he said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dalí's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!"

At this stage, Dalí's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward James. He had helped Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and by supporting him financially for two years. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.

In 1938, Dalí met Sigmund Freud thanks to Stefan Zweig. Later, in September 1938, Salvador Dalí was invited by Gabrielle Coco Chanel to her house La Pausa in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. There he painted numerous paintings he later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in New York. La Pausa has been partially replicated at the Dallas Museum of Art to welcome the Reves collection and part of Chanel's original furniture for the house.

In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an anagram for ''Salvador Dalí'', and a phonetic rendering of the French ''avide à dollars'', which may be translated as "eager for dollars". This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work, and the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead. The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.

In 1940, as World War II was in full swing at Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dalí never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.

In 1941, Dalí drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called ''Moontide''. In 1942, he published his autobiography, ''The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí''. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in ''The Miami Herald'', depicting Dalí dressing an automobile in an evening gown.

An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947. In 2005, a sculpture of Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been claimed that Dalí gave this work to his exorcist out of gratitude, and two Spanish art experts confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.

Later years in Catalonia

Starting in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists. As such, it is probable that the common dismissal of Dalí's later works by some Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton organized an exhibit called ''Homage to Surrealism'', celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dalí's ''Sistine Madonna'' in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.

Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important influence on pop art. Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary. Dalí was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting ''Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)''.

Dalí's post–World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he had been inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age". Therefore Dalí labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as "The Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949) and "Corpus Hypercubus" (1954), Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. "Nuclear Mysticism" included such notable pieces as ''La Gare de Perpignan'' (1965) and ''The Hallucinogenic Toreador'' (1968–70). In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.

In 1968, Dalí filmed a humorous television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates. In this, he proclaims in French "Je suis fou de chocolat Lanvin!" (I'm crazy about Lanvin chocolate) while biting a morsel causing him to become crosseyed and his moustache to swivel upwards. In 1969, he designed the Chupa Chups logo in addition to facilitating the design of the advertising campaign for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and creating a large on-stage metal sculpture that stood at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

In the television programme ''Dirty Dalí: A Private View'' broadcast on Channel 4 on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with Dalí in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.

In 1980, Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife, Gala, allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dalí was a wreck, and his right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms.

In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed on Dalí the title of ''Marqués de Dalí de Púbol'' () in the nobility of Spain, hereby referring to Púbol, the place where he lived. The title was in first instance hereditary, but on request of Dalí changed for life only in 1983. To show his gratitude for this, Dalí later gave the king a drawing (''Head of Europa'', which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed. Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt, or perhaps in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, or possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum in his final years.

There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in forgeries and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dalí.

In November 1988, Dalí entered the hospital with heart failure, and on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dalí.

On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of ''Tristan and Isolde'' played, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full circle, is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks from the house where he was born.

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his official estate. The U.S. copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. In 2002, the Society made the news when they asked Google to remove a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate Dalí, alleging that portions of specific artworks under their protection had been used without permission. Google complied with the request, but denied that there was any copyright violation.

Symbolism

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in ''The Persistence of Memory'' suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.

The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works. It first appeared in his 1944 work ''Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening''. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire" along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure." "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, ''Dalí and Surrealism''.

The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in ''The Great Masturbator'' and ''The Metamorphosis of Narcissus''. ''The Metamorphosis of Narcissus'' also symbolized death and petrification. Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.

Endeavors outside painting

Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were ''Lobster Telephone'' and ''Mae West Lips Sofa'', completed by Dalí in 1936 and 1937, respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James commissioned both of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English estate in West Dean, West Sussex when he was five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s. "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for [Dalí]," according to the display caption for the ''Lobster Telephone'' at the Tate Gallery, "and he drew a close analogy between food and sex." The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.

The wood and satin ''Mae West Lips Sofa'' was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating. West was previously the subject of Dalí's 1935 painting ''The Face of Mae West''. ''Mae West Lips Sofa'' currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in England.

Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous jewel, "The Royal Heart", is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself commented that "Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The "Dalí – Joies" ("The Jewels of Dalí") collection can be seen at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, where it is on permanent exhibition.

In theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for Federico García Lorca's 1927 romantic play ''Mariana Pineda''. For ''Bacchanale'' (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera ''Tannhäuser'', Dalí provided both the set design and the libretto. ''Bacchanale'' was followed by set designs for ''Labyrinth'' in 1941 and ''The Three-Cornered Hat'' in 1949.

Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema: "things themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera; and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and how creative or imaginative it looks. Dalí was active in front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as ''Destino'', on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film ''Un Chien Andalou'', a 17-minute French art film co-written with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. ''Un Chien Andalou'' was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled ''L'Age d'Or'', and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. ''L'Age d'Or'' was "banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown." Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films, ''Un Chien Andalou'' and ''L'Age d'Or'', have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement. "If ''Un Chien Andalou'' stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then ''L'Âge d'Or'' is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."

Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence in Hitchcock's ''Spellbound'', which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called ''Chaos and Creation'', which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on the Disney short film production ''Destino''. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song "Destino". When Disney hired Dalí to help produce the film in 1946, they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dalí's artwork interacting with Disney's character animation. Dalí completed only one other film in his lifetime, ''Impressions of Upper Mongolia'' (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several weeks.

Dalí built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. In 1950, Dalí created a special "costume for the year 2045" with Christian Dior. Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman.

With Man Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with the others, he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the ''Dalí Atomica'' series (1948)—inspired by his painting ''Leda Atomica'' — which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water, and Dalí himself floating in the air."

References to Dalí in the context of science are made in terms of his fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

In this respect, ''The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory'', which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to ''The Persistence of Memory'', and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's acknowledgment of the new science.

Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués, as well as the ''Dream of Venus'' surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His literary works include ''The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí'' (1942), ''Diary of a Genius'' (1952–63), and ''Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution '' (1927–33). The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the rights to images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties, thus further confusing the Dalí print market. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale ''Suomi'' tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Dalí decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's ''Studio Linie''.

One of Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo. Lear became his protégé and muse, writing about their affair in the authorized biography ''My Life With Dalí'' (1986). Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop. Referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein," some believe Lear's name is a pun on the French "L'Amant Dalí," or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dalí's side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.

An avid cheese maker, Dali would sometimes engross himself in cheese-making for over 4 months at a time. His favorite cheese was swiss.

Politics and personality

Salvador Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though his writings account anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.

As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of Trotskyist André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning on his politics. In his 1970 book ''Dalí by Dalí'', Dalí was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí fled from fighting and refused to align himself with any group. Likewise, after World War II, George Orwell criticized Dalí for "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in danger" after Dalí prospered there for years: "When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near." In a notable 1944 review of Dalí's autobiography, Orwell wrote, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."

After his return to Catalonia after World War II, Dalí became closer to the authoritarian Franco regime. Some of Dalí's statements supported the Franco regime, congratulating Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces." Dalí, having returned to the Catholic faith and becoming increasingly religious as time went on, may have been referring to the Republican atrocities during the Spanish Civil War. Dalí sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for prisoners. He even met Franco personally and painted a portrait of Franco's granddaughter.

He also once sent a telegram praising the ''Conducător'', Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. The Romanian daily newspaper ''Scînteia'' published it, without suspecting its mocking aspect. One of Dalí's few possible bits of open disobedience was his continued praise of Federico García Lorca even in the years when Lorca's works were banned.

Dalí, a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was famous for having said that "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí." The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dalí's expensive residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were startled when Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair. When signing autographs for fans, Dalí would always keep their pens. When interviewed by Mike Wallace on his ''60 Minutes'' television show, Dalí kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of-factly that "Dalí is immortal and will not die." During another television appearance, on ''The Tonight Show'', Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else.

Salvador Dalí frequently traveled with his pet ocelot Babou, even bringing it aboard the luxury ocean liner, SS France.

Legacy

Salvador Dalí has been cited as major inspiration from many modern artists, such as Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, Jeff Koons and most other modern surrealists. Salvador Dali's manic expression and famous moustache have made him something of a Cult icon for the bizarre & surreal.

Listing of selected works

Dalí produced over 1,500 paintings in his career in addition to producing illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, a great number of drawings, dozens of sculptures, and various other projects, including an animated short film for Disney. He also collaborated with director Jack Bond in 1965, creating a movie titled ''Dalí in New York''. Below is a chronological sample of important and representative work, as well as some notes on what Dalí did in particular years.

In Carlos Lozano's biography, ''Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me'', produced with the collaboration of Clifford Thurlow, Lozano makes it clear that Dalí never stopped being a surrealist. As Dalí said of himself: "the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist."

1910 ''Landscape Near Figueras''

1913 ''Vilabertin''

1916 ''Fiesta in Figueras'' (begun 1914)

1917 ''View of Cadaqués with Shadow of Mount Pani''

1918 ''Crepuscular Old Man'' (begun 1917)

1919 ''Port of Cadaqués (Night)'' (begun 1918) and ''Self-portrait in the Studio''

1920 ''The Artist's Father at Llane Beach'' and ''View of Portdogué (Port Aluger)''

1921 ''The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqués)'' (begun 1920) and ''Self-portrait''

1922 ''Cabaret Scene'' and ''Night Walking Dreams''

1923 ''Self Portrait with L'Humanite'' and ''Cubist Self Portrait with La Publicitat''

1924 ''Still Life (Syphon and Bottle of Rum)'' (for García Lorca) and ''Portrait of Luis Buñuel''

1925 ''Large Harlequin and Small Bottle of Rum'' and a series of fine portraits of his sister Anna Maria, most notably ''Figure at a Window''

1926 ''The Basket of Bread'' and ''Girl from Figueres''

1927 ''Composition with Three Figures (Neo-Cubist Academy)'' and ''Honey is Sweeter than Blood'' (his first important surrealist work)

1929 (''An Andalusian Dog'') film in collaboration with Luis Buñuel, ''The Lugubrious Game'', ''The Great Masturbator'', ''The First Days of Spring'', and ''The Profanation of the Host'' 1930 (''The Golden Age'') film in collaboration with Luis Buñuel

1931 ''The Persistence of Memory'' (his most famous work, featuring the "melting clocks"), ''The Old Age of William Tell'', and ''William Tell and Gradiva''

1932 ''The Spectre of Sex Appeal'', ''The Birth of Liquid Desires'', ''Anthropomorphic Bread'', and ''Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate''. ''The Invisible Man'' (begun 1929) completed (although not to Dalí's own satisfaction)

1933 ''Retrospective Bust of a Woman'' (mixed media sculpture collage) and ''Portrait of Gala With Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder'', ''Gala in the Window''

1934 ''The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table'' and ''A Sense of Speed''

1935 ''Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus'' and ''The Face of Mae West''

1936 ''Autumn Cannibalism'', ''Lobster Telephone'', ''Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)'' and two works titled ''Morphological Echo'' (the first of which began in 1934)

1937 ''Metamorphosis of Narcissus'', ''Swans Reflecting Elephants'', ''The Burning Giraffe'', ''Sleep'', ''The Enigma of Hitler'', ''Mae West Lips Sofa'' and ''Cannibalism in Autumn''

1938 ''The Sublime Moment'' and ''Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach''

1939 ''Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time''

1940 ''Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire'', ''The Face of War''

1941 ''Honey is Sweeter than Blood''

1943 ''The Poetry of America'' and ''Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man''

1944 ''Galarina'' and ''Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening''

1944–48 ''Hidden Faces'', a novel

1945, ''Basket of Bread—Rather Death than Shame'' and ''Fountain of Milk Flowing Uselessly on Three Shoes''; also this year, Dalí collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on a dream sequence to the film ''Spellbound'', to mutual dissatisfaction

1946 ''The Temptation of St. Anthony''

1948 ''Les Elephants''

1949 ''Leda Atomica'' and ''The Madonna of Port Lligat''. Dalí returned to Catalonia this year

1951 ''Christ of Saint John of the Cross'' and ''Exploding Raphaelesque Head''

1951 Katharine Cornell, a portrait of the famed actress

1952 ''Galatea of the Spheres''

1954 ''The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory'' (begun in 1952), ''Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)'' and ''Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity''

1955 ''The Sacrament of the Last Supper,'' ''Lonesome Echo'', record album cover for Jackie Gleason

1956 ''Still Life Moving Fast'', ''Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas''

1957 ''Santiago el Grande'' oil on canvas on permanent display at Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB, Canada

1958 ''The Meditative Rose''

1959 ''The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus''

1960 ''Composición Numérica (de fond préparatoire inachevé)''

1960 Dalí began work on the Teatro-Museo Gala Salvador Dalí and ''Portrait of Juan de Pareja, the Assistant to Velázquez''

1963–1964 ''They Will All Come from Saba'' a work in water color depicting the Magi at St. Petersbur's Dali Museum

1965 Dalí donates a gouache, ink and pencil drawing of the Crucifixion to the Rikers Island jail in New York City. The drawing hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981

1965 ''Dalí in New York''

1967 ''Tuna Fishing''

1969 Chupa Chups logo

1969 – ''Improvisation on a Sunday Afternoon'', television collaboration with the rock group Nirvana

1970 ''The Hallucinogenic Toreador'', acquired in 1969 by A. Reynolds Morse & Eleanor R. Morse before it was completed

1972 ''La Toile Daligram'', ''Helena Devulina Diakanoff – dit., GALA''

1973 "Le Diners De Gala", an ornately illustrated cook book

1976 ''Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea''

1977 ''Dalí's Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece in the Form of a Cloud to Show Gala Completely Nude, Very Far Away Behind the Sun'' (stereoscopical pair of paintings)

1983 Dalí completes his final painting, ''The Swallow's Tail''

2003 , an animated short film originally a collaboration between Dalí and Walt Disney, is released. Production on began in 1945

The largest collections of Dalí's work are at the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, followed by the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which contains the collection of A. Reynolds Morse & Eleanor R. Morse. It holds over 1,500 works from Dalí. Other particularly significant collections include the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades, California. Espace Dalí in Montmartre, Paris, France, as well as the Dalí Universe in London, England, contain a large collection of his drawings and sculptures.

The unlikeliest venue for Dalí's work was the Rikers Island jail in New York City; a sketch of the Crucifixion he donated to the jail hung in the inmate dining room for 16 years before it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. Ironically, the drawing was stolen from that location in March 2003 and has not been recovered.

Novels

Under the encouragement of poet Federico García Lorca, Dalí attempted an approach to a literary career through the means of the "pure novel". In his only literary production, ''Hidden Faces'' (1944), Dalí describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s.

Gallery

See also

''Little Ashes''

Notes

References

Linde Sabler. "Dalí". London: Haus Publishing, 2004 (paperback, ISBN 978-1-904341-75-8).

Salvador Dali interviewed by Mike Wallace on ''The Mike Wallace Interview'' April 19, 1985

External links

;Biographies and news

Dalí's surreal wind-powered organ lacks only a rhinoceros

UbuWeb: Salvador Dalí—Interview and bank advertisement.

Salvador Dalí in the INA Archives – A collection of interviews and footage of Dalí in the French television

;Other links

Article on Dalí's religious faith

The Salvador Dalí photo library 60.000 photos

Article on Dalí's opera poem ''Être Dieu: opéra-poème, audiovisuel et cathare en six parties'' (Being God: a Cathar Audiovisual Opera-Poem in Six Parts)

Watch Un Chien Andalou at LikeTelevision

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation English language site

St. Petersburg Dalí Museum

Kurutz, Steven, "Hello, Dali: Surrealist Museum Becomes a Reality", ''The Wall Street Journal'' Speakeasy blog, January 11, 2011, 4:46 pm ET. Interview with St. Petersburg (FL) museum director Dr. Hank Hine about new building.

"The shameful life of Salvador Dalí" (the witches of Llers)".

Dalí and Fages: "that intelligent and most cordial of collaborations"

;Exhibitions

Espace Dalí">Espace Dalí—The unique permanent exhibition in France (Museum & Dalí Fine Art Galleries)

Dalí & Film – Tate Modern, London

Museum-Gallery Xpo: Salvador Dalí, Marquis de Púbol in Bruges

Museum of Modern Art

Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Salvador Dalí. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

Category:1904 births Category:1989 deaths Category:Catalan artists Category:Catalan painters Category:Exorcism Category:Légion d'honneur recipients Category:Marquesses of Spain Category:Modern artists Category:Modern painters Category:People from Alt Empordà Category:People with Parkinson's disease Category:Spanish sculptors Category:Spanish people Category:Spanish painters Category:Spanish printmakers Category:Spanish Roman Catholics Category:Surrealist artists Category:20th-century painters

af:Salvador Dalí ab:Салвадор Дали ar:سلفادور دالي an:Salvador Dalí az:Salvador Dali bn:সালভাদর দালি zh-min-nan:Salvador Dalí be:Сальвадор Далі be-x-old:Сальвадор Далі bo:སལ་ཝ་ཌོར་དཱ་ལི། bs:Salvador Dali br:Salvador Dalí bg:Салвадор Дали ca:Salvador Dalí i Domènech cs:Salvador Dalí cy:Salvador Dalí da:Salvador Dali de:Salvador Dalí et:Salvador Dalí el:Σαλβαδόρ Νταλί es:Salvador Dalí eo:Salvador Dalí eu:Salvador Dalí fa:سالوادور دالی hif:Salvador Dalí fr:Salvador Dalí fy:Salvador Dalí ga:Salvador Dalí gl:Salvador Dalí gan:答利 ko:살바도르 달리 hy:Սալվադոր Դալի hi:सेल्वाडोर दाली hr:Salvador Dalí io:Salvador Dalí ilo:Salvador Dali bpy:সালভাদর দালি id:Salvador Dalí ia:Salvador Dalí is:Salvador Dalí it:Salvador Dalí he:סלבדור דאלי kn:ಸಾಲ್ವಡರ್ ಡಾಲಿ pam:Salvador Dali ka:სალვადორ დალი kw:Salvador Dalí sw:Salvador Dali ku:Salvador Dalí la:Salvator Dalí lv:Salvadors Dalī lb:Salvador Dalí lt:Salvadoras Dali lmo:Salvador Dalí hu:Salvador Dalí mk:Салвадор Дали ml:സാൽവദോർ ദാലി mr:साल्वादोर दाली xmf:სალვადორ დალი arz:سالفادور دالى mn:Сальвадор Дали nah:Salvador Dalí nl:Salvador Dalí new:साल्भाडोर् डाली ja:サルバドール・ダリ no:Salvador Dalí nn:Salvador Dalí oc:Salvador Dalí uz:Salvador Dalí pag:Salvador Dalí pnb:سیلوادور ڈالی pms:Salvador Dalí nds:Salvador Dalí pl:Salvador Dalí pt:Salvador Dalí kaa:Salvador Dalí ro:Salvador Dalí qu:Salvador Dalí rue:Салвадор Далі ru:Дали, Сальвадор sah:Салвадор Дали sq:Salvador Dalí scn:Salvador Dalí simple:Salvador Dalí sk:Salvador Dalí sl:Salvador Dalí srn:Salvador Dalí sr:Салвадор Дали sh:Salvador Dalí fi:Salvador Dalí sv:Salvador Dalí ta:சல்வடோர் டாலி te:సాల్వడార్ డాలీ th:ซัลบาดอร์ ดาลี tr:Salvador Dalí uk:Сальвадор Далі ur:سیلواڈور ڈالی za:Salvador Dalí vi:Salvador Dalí vo:Salvador Dalí war:Salvador Dalí yi:סאלוואדאר דאלי yo:Salvador Dalí zh-yue:達利 bat-smg:Salvaduors Dali zh:萨尔瓦多·达利