Surrealism was born in 1924, with the Breton manifesto. This art movement was based on Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he stated: "Only if we let our imagination fly, freeing the subconscious, can we crush the barriers of reason."

The style had two branches: one was objective, totally figurative, and its leading exponent was Dali. The other was anti-objective, in which figures are almost entirely absent, replaced by lines and dots, and its leading artist was Miró.

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras, in the Spanish province of Gerona. After a Realist period in which he painted his "Girl at the Window", in 1929 he became a member of the Paris Surrealist group. His greatest inspiration was the world of dreams.

The picture we are looking at has a very long title. This is something the Catalan painter was very fond of. In the foreground, he places a beautiful female sleeping nude, which is reminiscent of Ariadne’s dream. The model is Gala, who was his wife and muse and whom he portrayed on numerous occasions. She is resting, free of gravity, in the middle of a fantastic, menacing landscape, produced by the simple buzzing of a bee.

Dalí was a superb draughtsman and an outstanding colourist, who liked to leave the viewer free to interpret his work.


(c) (R) 2013, MUSMon com S.L.
Text (a) Catalina Serrano Romero

Photo: Portrait of Salvador Dalí, 1939 (a) Author: Carl Van Vechten potograph collection. Library of Congress LOT 12735, no.275, LC-USZ62-116608 Source: Wikipedia (This image is available in the public domain from the US Library of Congress´s Prints and Photographs)