Chitrasutra in Vishnudharmottara Purana

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Vishnudharmottara Purana

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Texture

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Texture
    Texture is the element of art that refers to the way things feel, or look as if you could feel if touched (the illusion of touch).

Types of textures
Texture is the character of a surface and is both tactile and visual.

    Tactile texture is the tactile quality of a surface, such as rough, smooth, sticky, fuzzy, soft or slick. A real texture is one you can actually feel with your hand, such as a piece of sandpaper, a wet glass, or animal fur. It also can be created by an artist by doing a collage.

    Visual texture is a visual quality of a surface. It is the result from painting or drawing as the real texture.  Visual texture is an illusion of texture created by an artist. Paint can be manipulated to give the impression of texture, while the paper surface remains smooth and flat.   

We can also divide  texture in another category:
    Natural texture. It's the texture we find and it is not made by humans. For example: stones, sand, rice, etc.
    Artificial texture. It's the texture from things made by humans. For example: a pencil, a chair, a raincoat, etc.

    Texture can have more impact through variation and relief - contrasting rough areas with smooth ones. That will make a painting far more interesting than an even, unrelieved texture going from edge to edge. Remember - creating textures is easy; it’s where and how you place them that makes the difference between a good painting and an ordinary one.

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 By: OAV BK    05:40  No comments

Jupiter and Thetis is an 1811 painting by the French neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, in the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, France. Painted when the artist was yet 31, the work severely and pointedly contrasts the grandeur and might of a cloud-born Olympian male deity against that of a diminutive and half nude nymph. Ingres' subject matter is borrowed from an episode in Homer's Iliad when the sea nymph Thetis begs Jupiter to intervene and guide the fate of her son Achilles; who was at the time embroiled in the Trojan War.<sup>[1]

he painting is steeped in the traditions of both classical and neoclassical art, most notably in its grand scale of 136⅝ × 101¼ inches.[2] Ingres creates many visual contrasts between the Go</sup>

d and the slithering nymph: Jupiter is shown facing the viewer frontally with both his arms and legs spread broadly across the canvas, while the color of his dress and flesh echos that of the marble at his feet. In contrast, Thetis is rendered in sensuous curves and portrayed in supplication to the mercy of a cruel God who holds the fate of her son in his hands. Thetis' right hand falls on Jupiter's hip with a suggestion of erotic caress, while the dark green of her dress accents the dread and foreboding of the bare landscape behind. Her clothing is drawn up against her lower hip, and seems about to fall off. The focal point of the work is Thetis' left hand extended vertically upright as she attempts to stroke the beard of the God.^[1]


upiter's pose is closely based on that of the famous chryselephantine sculpture, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia (Zeus being Jupiter's Greek equivalent), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This was made by the Greek sculptor of the Classical period, Phidias, circa 432 BC and destroyed in Antiquity, but its pose is known from coins and small replicas. Here the pose is reversed right to left, and the arm to the viewer's right is higher than in the original, which held out a statue of Nike.
Jupiter and Thetis was painted to meet the artist's obligations to the French Academy in Rome,^[3] and although its overhand tone correctly reflected the patriarchal bias of Napoleon's regime in its contrast between male power and female subservience,^[3] it is generally regarded as a rejection of such values.^[1] Ingres highly regarded the painting, and in a manner it marries the great motifs of his career: the voluptuousness of the female character and the authoritative austerity on the male deity.^[1]
Ingres kept Jupiter and Thetis in his studio until 1834, when it was purchased by the state. In 1848, he made a single pencil copy.^[1] The painting was first exhibited at the 1811 Paris Salon,^[4] at a time when Ingres' attention to line coupled with his disregard for anatomical reality was yet to find favour among critics.

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THE SOCIO-ART LANGUAGE OF THE JUANGS

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By- Dhirendranath Thakur

THE SOCIO-ART LANGUAGE OF THE JUANGS

Gonasika, a place in the highlands of Keonjhar district is believed to be the place where the first man i.e. a Juang was born on earth. The main concentration of the Juangs is in the tablelands of Keonjhar district, valleys of Pallalhara sub-division and the plains of Dhenkanal district. It is a tribe, which is found nowhere else in the country except in the State of Odisha.

The Juangs are born-artists like so many of their clan members and other tribal groups. The professional categorization is alien to them. The tribe has a language of its own, which is unwritten and comes under the Mundari group of the Austro-Asiatic language family.

The Juangs have a distinct culture reflected in their songs, dances, mud murals, monochrome ritual paintings and woodcarvings. They believe that their dead ancestors continue to live as spirits around their houses. They reside in their houses and keep a constant watch over the activities of their descendants.

The art practices of the Juangs are versatile, reflected in their woodcarvings, presented on their doors, wooden posts and rafters, beautifully engraved bamboo and wooden combs of various shapes and ornaments. The Juangs are also muralists and body-artists. They’ve expertise in the art of tattooing. Their patterns, designs, motifs and icons are very much genuine. The Juang is a conscious tribe. Their sociocultural consciousness is mirrored in their tradition of MaÆÕaghara.

At the centre of the Juang village are two large huts called MaÆÕagharas.21 The MaÆÕagharas are open and spacious. These are simple constructions without any complications in architectural designs. The ground plan is squarish in shape. At times two or three sides of the house remain closed and covered with walls. The front is left open and bare as the entrance. The walls are plastered with red clay and mud. The roof is thatched and placed over a bamboo structure done with a crisscross design pattern supported by carved wooden beams and pillars. It is really nice observing the low hanging roofs resting on beautifully carved wooden pillars. The central pillars inside are large standing figures. The beams and rafters are decorated with incised geometrical figures of human beings, animals, birds and lizards. The heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon, and stars are carved in distinct primitive renderings. These testify to their aesthetic sensibility. The architectural design of MaÆÕaghara is a precursor to the rural house architecture of Odishan villages. The MaÆÕaghara lends a cultural continuation in both creative and recreative spontaneity in the Juang village.

The Juangs are painters and sculptors of rare creativity. On the walls therefore, one finds mud reliefs of groups of dancers painted with red ochre. There are also clay installations of Juang icons and other primitive images inside MaÆÕaghara that project a view of the village museum. Musical instruments are hung on the walls. Along with the musical instruments, one also finds weapons and precious belongings. MaÆÕaghara preserves in its precincts artefacts of antiquity belonging to older generations. As a socio-cultural institution, it has a great relevance to the Juangs. The primitive societies, like those of Juangs, are often bound by set taboos and disciplines prescribed by their own community. It depends on institutions like MaÆÕaghara to translate them into actions.

---

21Fischer, Eberhard, Sitakant Mahapatra, and Dinanath Pathy. Orissa: Kunst und Kultur in Nordost-Indien. German. Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 1980. Pp. 66-67-68.

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Painting during the Sultanate period

 By: Unknown    20:47  1 comment

INDO-ISLAMIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE (712-1757)

THE TURKO-AFGHAN SULTANATE OF DELHI (1206-1526)

Painting during the Sultanate period

The Indo-Islamic era brought changes in the practice, scale, format, organization, and genres of painting in India. Monumental sculpture as an art form declined, while wall painting was eclipsed, though not entirely replaced, by small-scale paintings illustrating texts.

Illuminated manuscripts

Around the tenth century, a new phenomenon, the illustrated book, made its appearance around the globe from Chartres through Isfahan to Beijing. Paintings became a portable commodity, private collections were formed, and illustrated books came to denote wealth and prestige. No expense was spared on materials and craftsmanship, Opulently produced manuscripts, bought and sold, presented, cere­monially exchanged, or acquired as war booty, were precious objects which only persons of royal or noble birth could afford. Unlike the communal art of the temple, calligraphers and painters were employed by the scriptoria belonging to patrons of substantial means whose taste became paramount. In particular, Muslim calligraphers who tran­scribed the word of Allah enjoyed a high reputation in a society that prized the art of the book.

Even though writing had been known in India since Asokan times, it had been confined to secular subjects, or to stone and metal inscrip­tions that served as public documents. Sacred texts such as the Vedas were orally transmitted because of the importance of enunciating each word perfectly. In India, the earliest illustrated texts were the tenth­ century Tantric Buddhist treatises, which came out of monasteries at Nalanda in Bihar and Paharpur in Bengal. However, in less than two centuries a flourishing painting tradition grew up on the west coast under the patronage ofJain merchants, who set up great libraries and commissioned artists to illustrate two major texts, Kalpasutra and Kalakacarya Katha.

The Sultanate art of the book introduced paper and effected other changes in Indian painting. The long-held belief that Delhi sultans followed the Sacred Tradition (Hadith) in forbidding the painting of living forms has now been thoroughly disproved. The sultans bought Arabic, Turkish, and Persian texts for their libraries and commissioned new ones. In search of work, scholars and scribes from Baghdad, Bukhara, Samarqand, and other Islamic seats of learning came to Delhi, which acquired renown as an international centre for trade in manuscripts. Although actual paintings from the Delhi Sultanate have not been identified with certainty, we know from contemporary accounts that the sultans had picture galleries where they took their leisure, though the pious Firuz Tughlaq replaced human figures with floral paintings in his own chambers. However, other Tughlaq sultans even tolerated Hindu themes.

The only Sultanate paintings known to have survived are from the provinces. They demonstrate the process of the fusion of Persianl/Near Eastern and Indian painting conventions. The most famous, those illustrating the Ni'mat Nama (Book of Delicacies), were produced for Ghiyas ud-Din Khalji, sultan of Malwa (I469-I500), who, disillu­sioned with war, withdrew from the cares of state. A sixteenth ­century historian writes about this grand eccentric with his Epicurean approach to food and sex. An absolute ruler, he was able to fulfil his fantasies on an unprecedented scale, collecting I6,000 slave girls, dressing some of them in male attire, and teaching them different professions so that only women might serve him. The style of the Ni'mat Nama illustrators seems at first glance to be a provincial variant of Persian painting. A closer look at the treatment of faces and costumes reveals Indian authorship. The hands of two Indian artists, trained by a Persian master, have been identified. The more accom­plished one interprets Persian elements deftly and imaginatively in the light of his own experience. (Paradoxically, the less skilled one copies Persian models more slavishly.) These works are important in that they demonstrate the process by which styles are transferred and assimilated by artists. Here the Indian artist's own conventions act as essential schemata, which are modified in the light of the new style.

The two Indian artists identified as the illustrators of the Ni'mat Nama seem to have been part of a painting tradition that prevailed in north and northwest India during the Sultanate period, particularly between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, about which we only have sporadic information. Among these artists, the Gujarati ones mentioned earlier are best known among scholars as 'Jain painters' because of the large quantity of Jain subjects painted by them. Paper introduced from Iran and Syria allowed these artists to experiment with formats and dimensions, which had not been possible in narrow, palm leaf manuscripts. Jain merchants and bankers were particularly enthusiastic about commissioning illustrated manuscripts celebrating Jain saints. Many of these were produced with cheap material, their calligraphy and painting bereft of elegance. Their existence strongly suggests that patronage was no longer confined to the wealthy or to royalty but included lesser merchants and people of more modest means.

The so-called Jain painters have lately been reappraised in the light of the complex relationship between Islamic and Indian art and between Hindu/Jain and Muslim patronage. The Jain Kalakacarya Katha tells the story of how the abduction of the saint Kalaka's sister by the king of Ujjain was avenged by an ancient Sahi or Saka (Scythian) king. In ancient India, Sakas and Yavanas were the most prominent foreigners, and Yavana was the term later applied to Arabs and Turks. It is interesting that in some Jain manuscripts the painters represent the ancient Saka king in contemporary Arab costume or with the Mamluk (Islamic Egyptian) painting convention of three-quarter faces and sidelong glances. Conversely, a recently discovered illustrated Indian copy of the Persian epic Shah Nama could be mistaken for a Kalakacarya Katha. There is evidence that 'hybrid' painting styles such as these, and that of the Ni'mat Nama, arose out of the inter­mixture of cultures; the artists, trained in Gujarati workshops, were possibly provided with samples of Persian and Mamluk painting by their Muslim patrons. In the late fifteenth century, the Mediterranean trade was dominated by the Mamluks of Egypt who, in partnership with Gujarati merchants, were the major suppliers of cotton, opium, lac, and other Indian produce to the West.3' Painting on cotton as a major export from Gujarat to Egypt has been amply attested by the discovery of Gujarati textiles in graves in Fostat near Cairo. The recent identification of Mamluk elements in Jain paintings offers further visual evidence of this trading connection.

Secular painting

Illustrated texts, many of them secular, and of a quite different genre, were commissioned by the Muslim and Hindu aristocracy of the six­teenth century: 'Even now, I I remember her eyes I trembling, closed after love, I her slender body limp, I fine clothes and heavy hair loose/ a wild goose I in a thicket of lotuses of passion'. Thus rhapsodized the eighth-century Kashmiri poet Bilhana about his beloved Campavati in the Caurapancasika (Fifty verses of a Love Thief). The gentle eroticism of Bilhana's Caurapancasika marks a turning point in Indian culture, as the formal elegance of high Sanskrit yields to the intimate atmosphere of vernacular literature in Hindi, Bengali, and other provincial languages. Works such as the Rasika Priya of Kesav Das (1555-1617) elaborate a complex typology of ideal lovers and their mental states in which two emotions predominate: the heroine's intense longing for the absent lover and the joy of consummation. A new canon of feminine beauty permeates literature and art, according to which women are celebrated as passionate lovers, braving stormy nights and untold hazards to keep their rendezvous. These romantic lyrics offer a new outlet for Bhakti or devotional religion, in which the intensity of love outside marriage becomes a metaphor for the desire of the soul (Radha) for God (Krsna).

The Caurapancasika inspired a major series of paintings that became the benchmark for pre-Mughal art, not least because this set was the first to be discovered by modern scholars. Over the years many more have come to light that give us an ever clearer idea about painting in North India on the eve of Mughal conquest. A 'transparent' narra­tive device in the Caurapancasika, which tells the story by placing the aristocratic hero and heroine in an everyday architectural interior, becomes a long-lasting convention. These paintings essentially belong to the romantic world of Rajasthan that was foreign to Jain piety. Since most Hindu kingdoms were on the defensive in the sixteenth century, it is likely that they were produced in the independent Rajput kingdom of Mewar.

This painting tradition turned for inspiration to the Bhakti poems of Jayadeva and other poets. Ostensibly religious, the paintings capture the leisurely life at the courts of the Rajput kingdoms of northwest India, especially from the seventeenth century onwards. A related genre is the Ragamala ('garland of musical modes') painting, perhaps the most perfect marriage of literature, music, and painting. The modes of classical Indian music are conventionally divided into six male ragas, each having six wives, the 36 raginis. Each personification; of these modes evokes a particular mood related to the time of the day or the season, a number of which found expression in painting.

Literature and painting such as this might have remained parochial without the growing rapprochement of Hindu and Muslim cultures.

in the fourteenth century. Initially the conquerors had kept aloof from Hindu culture; Hindus on their part considered anybody outside the caste system as beyond the pale. The first signs of synthesis are evident in the work of the Indo-Turkish poet Amir Khusraw (1253-1325). Muslim Sufis and Hindu Bhakti saints began building bridges between the two communities. Syncretic movements such as the Satya Narayana cult (a blend of the Muslim saint Satya Pir and the Hindu god Vishnu) appealed to Hindu and Muslim villagers alike, as the sayings of the Muslim mystic Kabir came to be universally quoted in India. In the fourteenth century the Sufi Maulana Dau'd's text Candayana uses the story of the adulterous love of Laurak and Canda to inculcate the synthesis of Bhakti and Sufi doctrines.

The conventions of Jain sacred painting, modified in the secular Caurapancasika paintings as well as in illustrations to Muslim texts, are now known to have affected a much larger area of northern and central India than had hitherto been assumed. The style can also be seen in wall paintings at Man Singh's palace in Gwalior. In short, it is not correct to hold, as some do, that Jain painters influenced the paintings of Muslim Malwa and Hindu Rajasthan. These painters, perhaps the majority from western India, were professionals who adjusted their style according to the particular needs of their clients, whether Jain, Hindu, or Muslim. The experience of these painters, who were to join the Mughal emperor Akbar's workshop, proved to be valuable in the formation of Mughal painting.

The Mughal Empire (1526-1757)

The Mughal court and state

The Mughal empire was one of the three great empires of the sixteenth century, along with those of Charles V of Spain and the Chinese Son of Heaven. The Mughals brought about qualitative changes in Indian society that were global in scope, anticipating a secular, pluralistic out­look that we tend to associate with our age. The landed classes had been in decline in a number of societies, giving rise to the rule of absolute monarchs, whose power base was an efficient, loyal bureau­cracy. The impersonal state, whose urbanism, individualism, and 'objective' approach to nature laid the foundations of 'modernity', is more commonly associated with Renaissance Florence (C.1400-1600), but the same phenomena could be discerned during the Edo period in Japan (c.I600-1868) and in Mughal India (1526-1757). Yet it is not easy to understand why this burgeoning 'modernity' in Mughal India failed to take firm roots. Mughal 'urban' culture remained the personal achievement of the monarchs and the court. Lacking the social infrastructure that a large professional class, for instance, would have pro­vided, these developments could not be sustained. Noble households dominated the urban economy in a patron-client relationship between the sovereign and the aristocracy, especially in the later period. The artisans attached to workshops essentially served these dominant groups.' Other impediments to 'modernity' included the Hindu caste system, which discouraged social mobility, and the Mughal law of inheritance, whereby an official's personal property reverted back to the emperor after his death. Although this was a disincentive to wealth accumulation and encouraged conspicuous consumption, the 'urban' outlook itself had a powerful impact on Mughal patronage.

Contemporary literature bears witness to a new curiosity about everyday life that was a product of heightened individualism. Mughal autobiographies and diaries, written not only by monarchs but also by the ladies of the harem, were comparable in their lively detail and immediacy to Lady Murasaki's Tales of Genji and Bocaccio's Decameron. Babur (emperor 1526-30), the founder of the Mughal dynasty, reveals his enthusiasms, admits his mistakes with disarming candour, and offers penetrating observations about life around him. For much of present-day India, the refined urbanity and elegant lifestyle of the Mughal court, its standards of haute cuisine and its codification of Indian classical music remain the essential benchmark. Mughal blood sports were taken up by the British Raj, as was the game of polo. Mughal emperors took their sartorial elegance as seriously as their collections of curiosa, jewellery, and precious objects of jade and hardstone.

Mughal curiosity about science and technology was a sixteenth-century phenomenon. Mughal artillery proved decisive in battles, even though firearms had been introduced in the Deccan a century earlier through contacts with Iran and Syria. The age witnessed a rapid devel­opment in global communication, in part the result of European expansion. European travellers, some of them Jesuits, made their way to the Chinese and Mughal empires, which resulted in the exchange of objects and modes of thinking between the cultures. In India, however, curiosity about western things and ideas was confined to the Mughal emperor and his courtiers and did not filter down to other groups.

During the Mughal period the incipient 'urbanism' affected the subject matter of art, hitherto the preserve of the three great religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Mughal painting expressed a lively engagement with the external world, which may be loosely termed, 'realism'. Renaissance mimesis is universally familiar as the cornerstone' of western art history, yet a similar concern was expressed in Mughal , history painting and portraiture. The art of the book had transformed patronage during the Sultanate, a process that reached a climax during: the Mughal era. Art became an autonomous activity, fostering a close I relationship between the patron and the artist; it ceased to be a communal concern. The Mughal emperors were fervent patrons of the arts, their multifaceted personalities informing their patronage­- Akbar, the brilliant creator of a vast efficient empire; Jahangir, the en­dearing hedonist; and Shah Jahan, the royal architect and avid collector of precious objects-each was unique in his personal style of patronage. Yet, in at least one instance, patronage was not confined to royalty but included a grandee of the realm.

The reign of Akbar

Two cultural streams flowed in the veins of Akbar's grandfather, Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire: the Turko-Mongol tradition of his ancestors, Chinghis Khan and Timurlang, Marlowe's 'scourge of God', and the Persian culture which had deeply impressed the Mongols. A ruthless soldier, Timurlang had a weakness for beautiful things, collecting artisans from all over Asia in order to turn his capital, Samarqand, into a cultural wonder. Babur's temperament, as is evident from his remarkable autobiography, is an expression of this mixed heritage of violence and refinement, a characteristic shared in varying degrees by all three early emperors. 

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Salvador Dalí

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Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí (Spanish pronunciation:  was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothesto a self-styled Arab lineage claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork

Biography

Early life

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.

Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul. After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

Madrid and Paris

Wild-eyed antics of Dalí (left) and fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid^[7] and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the erotic advances of the poet

However, it was his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, that earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of these early works, Dalí probably did not completely understand the Cubist movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life.

Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, painted in 1926. That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan Miró. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dalí made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró.

Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant garde His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez He used both classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez. The moustache became an iconic trademark of his appearance for the rest of his life.

1929 through World War II

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also, in August 1929, Dalí met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.

Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription, "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait.

Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set foot in Cadaquès again. Dalí later claimed that, in response, he handed his father a condom containing his own sperm, saying, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymoreThe following summer, Dalí and Gala would rent a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea.

The Persistence of Memory

In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by insects.

Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The exhibition in New York of Dalí's works, including Persistence of Memory, created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere.^[25] In that year, Dalí and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by heiress Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him about his apology for a surrealist act.

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention. Dalí insisted that surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism. Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism.

In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind.

Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film Rose Hobart at Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dalí became famous for another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to take place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring Dalí's work. Dalí was in the audience at the screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made,” he said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dalí's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!

At this stage, Dalí's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward James. He had helped Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and by supporting him financially for two years. They became good friends, and James is featured in Dalí's painting Swans Reflecting Elephants. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.^{[citation needed]}

In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an anagram for Salvador Dalí, and a phonetic rendering of the French avide à dollars, which may be translated as "eager for dollars This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work, and the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead.^{[citation needed]} The Surrealist movement and various members thereof would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.

In 1940, as World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dalí never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.

In 1941, Dalí drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald, depicting Dalí dressing an automobile in an evening gown.^[32] Also in The Secret Life, Dalí suggested that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. Buñuel was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal Spellman of New York went to see Iris Barry, head of the film department at MOMA. Buñuel then went back to Hollywood where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner Brothers from 1942 to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (English translation My Last Sigh published 1983), Buñuel wrote that, over the years, he rejected Dalí's attempts at reconciliation.

An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947 In 2005, a sculpture of Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been claimed that Dalí gave this work to his exorcist out of gratitude, and two Spanish art experts confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.

Later years in Catalonia

Starting in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists As such, it is probable that the common dismissal of Dalí's later works by some Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton organized an exhibit called Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.^[36]

Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works  and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner  Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important influence on pop art. Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary. Dalí was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

Dalí's post-World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he had been inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age". Therefore Dalí labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as "The Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949) and "Corpus Hypercubus" (1954), Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. "Nuclear Mysticism" included such notable pieces as "La Gare de Perpignan" (1965) and "Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1968–70). In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.^{[citation needed]}

In 1968, Dalí filmed a television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates, and in 1969, he designed the Chupa Chups logo. Also in 1969, he was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and created a large metal sculpture that stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

In the television programme Dirty Dalì: A Private View broadcast on Channel 4 on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with Dalí in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.

In 1980, Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife, Gala, allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dalí was a wreck, and his right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms.

In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Dalí the title Marquis of Púbol, for which Dalí later repaid him by giving him a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed.

Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt, or possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom  under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, or possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum in his final years.

There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in forgeries and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to DalíIn November 1988, Dalí entered the hospital with heart failure, and on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dalí.

On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full circle, is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks from the house where he was born.

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his official estate. The U.S. copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. In 2002, the Society made the news when they asked Google to remove a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate Dalí, alleging that portions of specific artworks under their protection had been used without permission. Google complied with the request, but denied that there was any copyright violation.^]

Symbolism

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.

The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works. It first appeared in his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure." "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and Surrealism.

The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.

Endeavors outside painting

The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948), shown before its supporting wires were removed.

Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dalí in 1936 and 1937, respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James commissioned both of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English estate in West Dean, West Sussex when he was five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s. "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for [Dalí]," according to the display caption for the Lobster Telephone at the Tate Gallery, "and he drew a close analogy between food and sex. The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.

The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating. West was previously the subject of Dalí's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in England.

Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous jewel, "The Royal Heart," is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself commented that "Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The "Dalí — Joies" ("The Jewels of Dalí") collection can be seen at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, where it is on permanent exhibition.

In theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for García Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda. For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser, Dalí provided both the set design and the libretto. Bacchanale was followed by set designs for Labyrinth in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949.

Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema: "things themselves"—the facts that are presented in the world of the camera, and "photographic imagination"—the way the camera shows the picture and how creative or imaginative it looks. Dalí was active in front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as cocreator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art film cowritten with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un Chien Andalou was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L’age d’or, and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L’age d’or was "banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown hough negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films, Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or, have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'Âge d'or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent.

Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his movie, which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on Disney cartoon production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song entitled "Destino." When Disney hired Dalí to help produce Destino in 1946, they were not prepared for the work they had ahead of themselves. For eight months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the animated movie; however, it was eventually finished and shown in various film festivals. The movie consists of Dalí's artwork interacting with Disney's classic princesslike character animation. Dalí completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several weeks.

Dalí built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. With Christian Dior in 1950, Dalí created a special "costume for the year 2045. Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman.

With Man Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with the others, he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the Dalí Atomica series (1948)—inspired by his painting Leda Atomica—which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water, and Dalí himself floating in the air.

References to Dalí in the context of science are made in terms of his fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the ic

onography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.

In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's acknowledgment of the new science.

Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués as well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a Genius (1952–63), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927–33). The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the rights to images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties, thus further confusing the Dalí print market.

One of Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo. Lear became his protégé and muse riting about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dalí (1986). Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop. Referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein, some believe Lear's name is a pun on the French "L'Amant Dalí," or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dalí's side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.

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