An Introduction to Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali can be seen and explained from many viewpoints - in fact it is essential to approach him in this way. He was an artist in the Renaissance style who combined a deep respect for tradition with intensely modern concerns. He was a versatile artist with scientific intuitions., an agent provocateur of the imagination, a Surrealist, a visionary ahead of his time. Above all, however, Dali must be understood as a creator endowed with far-reaching technical and artistic resources that were supported by a vast range of knowledge. He boldly explained the more enigmatic areas of our thoughts by means of his paranoiac-critical method of inerpretation, and he transformed reality, both for himself and for others. He himself defined paranoia as "a systematic illusion of interpretation [which] constitutes, in a more or less morbid state, the basis of the artistic phenomenon, in general, and of my genius for transforming reality in particular".
There is, however, another way of interpreting Salvador Dali: as the quintessentially media-savvy artist who sought the recognition of the cociety around him. He energetically exploited the mass media to promote himself and his work, to provide us with the image that he wanted to present of himself, to construct his own legend. Few twentieth-cnetury creators have succeeded so decisively in being the beginning and end of thier own creation, in projecting the artist as both a myth and a creator of myths, as a star in popular culture. This approach made Dali a precursor of so many of today's artists. He was a pioneer in the use of advertising as a platform for disseminating art.
Dali's work is boundless and it continuously reveals new facets of his creativity, while the man himself is a veritable myth who recreated various mythologies - from noth the classical worlld and his presonal universe. He stands, above all, as a unique artist who still attracts and intrigues us. As Dali himself said, "I believe in magic which, ultimately, is mearely the poser to materialize the imagination in reality. Our super-mechanized age underestimates the attributes of the irrational imagination, which is still the basis of all discoveries".
Dali's iconography provides a point of reference for the popular imagination of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as offering a tour of the various movements that helped to shape it: Impressionism, Pointillism, Futurism, Cubism, Objectivism, Surrealism, nuclear mysticism, action painting, pop art, holography and stereocopy. He was an artist capable of working in all fields of creation, from conventional ones such as painting, drawing, sculpture and printing to more innovative formats, such as installations, happenings and performances. One of the defining features of Dali's work is its precise definition of elements that only pass fleetingly through the collective imagination of the world of dreams and intuitive actions.