Salvador Dalí: “I declare the independence of imagination and the rights of man to his own madness”

Salvador Dalí

In the Mind of Great Artists

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“I declare the independence of imagination and the rights of man to his own madness.”
Salvador Dalí

Dalí was an artist who can be defined in two words: eccentricity and provocation.

His most remarkable paintings are a result of the application of his own method inserted within Surrealism. It is the paranoid-critical method, which he defined as a spontaneous system of irrational knowledge “based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”

His works, as in this painting, make an impact due to their technical precision and a mystical and symbolic universe which is very personal and disturbing.

Everyday objects become icons of the desires and fears of the human being. His “painted dreams” as he expressed his works should be observed are the expression and liberation of sexual fantasies and existential angst.

Egocentric and controversial, when André Breton the founder and ideologist of the movement threw him out of the movement, the Catalan declared “I cannot be expelled from Surrealism because I AM Surrealism.”

Image: The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946).

Recommended links:

The Persistence of Memory.

The Paranoid-Critical Method.

Salvador Dalí and his Paranoid-Critical Method.

Surrealism.

The “Avant-garde” Movements.

Psychic automatism.

Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting: The Treachery of Images, Magritte.

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