Salvador Dali: painting the fourth dimension

The Surrealist painter Dali is largely seen as an eccentric, money-hungry artist. But such three dimensional descriptions do not capture the visionary who tried to paint the fourth dimension on his two-dimensional canvas.

Philip Coppens


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Artists are apparently supposed to be poor – you are supposed to suffer for your art. This is why we like Vincent van Gogh, who was very poor and in his time extremely unpopular. It provides art critics with a sense that these people were misunderstood, not appreciated, but how far we have advanced, for “now” we realise their talents. The Spanish Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, however, always made it known that he did not share this rather bizarre ambition. He wanted to earn money in order to work as he pleased. André Breton, the “Pope of Surrealism”, hence nicknamed him “Avida Dollars” – an anagram of his name, meaning “eager for dollars”. Indeed, Dali liked money, but it seems this is where most observers of Dali content themselves with: he was a painter, a surrealist painter, in love with money, who painted for the money.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Dalí's artistic repertoire included paintings, film, sculpture and photography. Wherever he went, he stood out through clothing, coiffure and behaviour, supporting a moustache that was itself a work of art. If that did not cause spectacle enough, there were other means. In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture entitled “Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques” (authentic paranoid ghosts) was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit.
His paintings are not only surreal, they are ingenious. There are his numerous depictions of what is known as soft watches or melting clocks, his ingenious method of conveying to the reader that time is tired. The idea was according to some based on his knowledge of Einstein's theory that time is relative. He apparently got the idea when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese during a hot summer’s day – or at least that is the theory for those who do not want to underline his hallucinogenic indulgences.
The most famous of these enigmatic images is equally one of his most famous works: “The Persistence of Memory”, painted in 1931, in which these melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. In this other dimension, time is of no relevance. In his painting “The Search for the Fourth Dimension”, the limp clocks are still present, as well geometric shapes and figures; the pentagram somehow emerges from a cliff face; the pentagram is repeated elsewhere when he works his version of the Last Supper into this geometric shape. There is “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, in which he has used imagery from Bernini’s famous elephant sculpture in Rome and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: an elephant supporting an obelisk on its back, but whose legs Dali has extended, as if this and the other animals on the painting appear to walk on stilts....>

http://www.philipcoppens.com/dali.html

http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/home.html

If you're ever in that Central Florida Hell with some free time, I encourage you to see it. What the pictures you've probably seen in books or on the internet don't convey is their actual scale - some of his most famous works are only about the size of a piece of letter paper or smaller, while others are huge two-story murals. Seeing them in person adds a whole new level to their impact.