By Paul Chimera Dalí Historian & Journalist Sweet, tranquil and charming aren’t exactly adjectives that leap to mind when one considers the art of Salvador Dalí. But those of us who know better know that, indeed, there are plenty of lovely Dalí paintings, Dalí prints and others works by the master of Surrealism that…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian What? There’s something about artist Salvador Dalí and, specifically, about a Dalí painting, that the whole world seems to agree on! Seriously? It appears that way, when the subject is Dalí’s tiny little jewel of an oil painting, “The Spectre of Sex Appeal,” one of the…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian Today’s Salvador Dalí painting – “Image Mediumnique Paranoiaque” of 1935 – is both typical and atypical of Dalí’s imagery and style. It’s a very small picture, open and airy in parts, tight and precise in others. What was Dalí thinking when the 31-year-old set up his canvas…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian “Spain” (1938) is universally regarded as one of the finest and most important paintings in all of Salvador Dalí’s surrealism. When we try our best to get inside Dalí’s head – a generally impossible task, of course – we can readily see that, in “Spain,” the…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian One of the great things about Salvador Dalí paintings, Dalí prints, drawings and other works by the Spanish master of surrealism is that you can often see things in them that you didn’t see during earlier visits. This happened to me just today, as I was…
By Paul Chimera Dalí writer & historian What motivated Dalí? What inspired him? What was in his head before he set brush to canvas? Intriguing questions – ones often not easily answered. But today let’s try to answer them as they apply to a work from the 1930s – a period most critics…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian I have a feeling Dalí art aficionados are not ambivalent about his 1947 oil on canvas, “Intra-atomic Equilibrium of a Swan’s Father” (often shortened to simply “Feather Equilibrium”). They either really admire the work, or find it flat and somehow lacking in emotional impact. Your humble…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian A small Dalí painting with a huge impact and following, “Leda Atomica” (1949) is one of Salvador Dalí’s best works – masterfully painted and among the true treasures in the permanent collection of the Teatru-Museu Dalí in Figueres, Spain. Certain paintings by Dalí seem to have…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian On this President’s Day in the U.S.A., I thought we’d take a look at a little-known and rather unusual Dalí mixed-media piece that spotlights the U.S. president at the time the work was created, 1942 – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, better known as FDR. Salvador Dalí and…
By Paul Chimera Dalí Writer & Historian “Sleep” is one of the best-known surrealist paintings by Salvador Dalí; practically every book featuring representative examples of Dalí’s art includes this painting from 1937. People seem to love it – perhaps because of its relative simplicity, while at the same time due to its bizarre…