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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
like the master, in scrap metal, before heading off down
his own illustrious career path in the 1930s, welding steel
rods and sheets into wildly distorted figures.
The dream team: Dalí and Miró
A generation on from Picasso two Catalan painters shone
among the writers, artists and dramatists creating under
the Surrealist banner in 1920s Paris. Salvador Dalí and
Joan Miró both began exploring the unconscious mind in paint, wandering
through doors unlocked by Sigmund Freud. Initially Dalí toyed with Cubism
while studying in Madrid, but a move to Paris in 1929 kick-started the
“hand-painted dream photographs” (as he called them) that consumed the
rest of his long career. His most memorable work surfaced in the 1930s:
some, likeApparition d’un visage et d’un compotier sur une plage(1938),
carried more than one image (is it a face, a landscape or a dog...or all three?);
others, likeLa persistance de la mémoire(1931), wore the now familiar
leitmotifs of Dalí’s work: the ants and the floppy clocks. Common to all
of his paintings, Dalí’s brushwork bore a meticulously detailed realism,
reminiscent of masters of old and somehow at odds with the dreamlike
chaos of their subject matter. He found Catholicism in the late 1940s and
many of his subsequent paintings reflected this new passion, perhaps most
spectacularly the perspective-defyingChrist de Saint-Jean-de-la-Croix(1951).
In contrast Joan Miró created unreal, fantastical impressions of the
subconscious, using what he and the rest of the art world termed Abstract
Surrealism. His paintings were pared down to simple shapes, lines and dots.
Nearly always vibrantly coloured, they often had a naïve, childlike quality.
Frequently they incorporated the flat, two-dimensional shapes of folksy
Catalan art with its Romanesque origins, acknowledgement of the fact that
Miró spent more time on home turf (Majorca in particular) than any of the
other greats of 20thcentury Spanish art.Retrato(1938), with its vivid colours
and simple shapes, and the enormousDona I Ocell(1983) sculpture in
Barcelona are typical. He never aligned himself wholly with the Surrealists,
preferring the versatility of media and style that being a bit of a loner allowed.
His sculptural work, prints and paintings had a particularly strong impact on
post-war American artists.
“EACH MORNING
WHEN I AWAKE, I
EXPERIENCE AGAIN A
SUPREME PLEASURE
–THATOFBEING
SALVADOR DALÍ.”
Salvador Dalí
