15 Salvador Dali’s Most Famous Paintings

15 Salvador Dali’s Most Famous Paintings

Anyone interested in art has definitely come across the name Salvador Dali. He is famous for his lavish demeanor and trademark mustache as much as for his creative output, which included painting, sculpture, product and set design, and film. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domènech (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist recognized for his technical prowess, precise draftsmanship, and startling and unexpected images.

Dali was influenced by Impressionism and Renaissance masters from a young age, and he later became fascinated by Cubism and avant-garde movements. He joined the Surrealist group in 1929 where he ended up becoming one of its leading exponents. Are you interested in Dali’s work? If so, this article will help you grasp the motivation behind all of his paintings. Here are 15 of his most famous paintings that you should know.

Read also; 15 Most Famous Spanish Painters

1. The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Kalafart, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is one of Surrealism’s most iconic and identifiable paintings. The little canvas (24×33 cm) is sometimes referred to as “Melting Clocks“, “The Soft Watches” and “The Melting Watches” in popular culture. The picture depicts a dream world in which everyday goods are twisted and portrayed in an unusual and irrational manner. Timepieces and solid and hard objects appear oddly limp and melting in the barren environment. In this painting, Dali smoothly combines the real and the imagined in order to systemize confusion and thus help discredit completely the world of reality.

2. The Great Masturbator (1929)

Dali The Great Masturbator is a psychic snapshot of where Dali was at the time he created this big piece. The primary picture is a well-known rock at Cullero, on Cape Creus in Spain, which Dali likened to a head with its nose pressed to the ground. It has evolved into a strange kind of self-portrait of the artist. The masturbator’s huge head is one of the artist’s multiple personifications, which appear in several simultaneous scenarios in the picture, expressing the spiritual and erotic upheaval that Dali had just undergone as a result of Gala’s presence in his life. This distressing piece also depicts Dali’s imagination reaching a peak, particularly in relation to the motif of the grasshopper suckling the main metamorphosed figure, as Dali had always had a particular fear of the insect since childhood.

3. The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (1934)

Johannes Vermeer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali Vermeer is depicted as a dark lanky person kneeling in The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table. The figure’s outstretched leg acts as a tabletop for a bottle and a small glass. The size of the picture is 18.1 cm and 13.97 cm. The picture alludes to Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Picture, a famous seventeenth-century work in which a painter, assumed to be a self-portrait of Vermeer, is represented with his back to us, dressed in characteristic clothes. It is one of several paintings that demonstrate Dali’s deep appreciation for Vermeer.

4. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936)

Dali created this self-inflicted devastation allegory while residing in Paris in early 1936, on the verge of Spain’s horrific civil war between Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalist forces and the elected Republic. The picture is notable for its attention to terrible detail. A groaning giant stands over a sun-baked Spanish landscape, tearing itself apart deliriously. The limbs are reversed and turned upside down, while the trunk of the body is completely absent. A limp phallic shape draped across a shortened hip is a remarkable example of Dal’s soft forms, implying decay and death. The title’s scattered beans symbolize the weird size incongruities that suggest the workings of an unconscious mind.

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5. The Burning Giraffe (1937)

JIP, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali painted the Burning Giraffe in 1937 before his exile in the United States from 1940 until 1948. Despite his declaration that he is apolitical, this painting depicts his personal struggle with the war in his native country. The open drawers in this expressive, propped-up female figure which Dali later called “Femme-coccyx” (tailbone woman) so allude to man’s inner, subconscious. According to Dali, his paintings are “a kind of allegory which serves to illustrate a certain insight.” This phenomenon can be traced back to Freud’s Psychoanalysis, which Dali highly regarded. He saw him as a huge stride forward for civilization.

6. Swans reflecting elephants (1937)

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) is a work by Dali from his paranoid-critical era. It was created with oil on canvas and features one of Dali’s renowned double images. The twin images were an important component of Dali’s “paranoia-critical method,” which he proposed in his 1935 essay “The Conquest of the Irrational.” He described his method as a “spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena.” Dali employed this technique to create the hallucinogenic forms, double images, and visual illusions that dominated his paintings during the 1930s. Swans Reflecting Elephants, like earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, uses a lake’s reflection to produce the double image shown in the artwork. In Metamorphosis, Narcissus’ reflection is employed to mirror the contour of the hand on the right of the image.

7. Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)

Saimonsays1991, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali’s depiction of the Greek fable of Narcissus is depicted in this artwork. Narcissus was a beautiful young man who loved only himself and crushed many lovers’ hearts. He was chastised by the gods after seeing his own reflection in a pool. He fell in love with it but was unable to embrace it and died of frustration. The gods rewarded his perseverance by immortalizing him as the narcissus (daffodil) flower. Dali utilized a laborious process he characterized as “hand-painted color photography” to represent the change of Narcissus, kneeling in the water, into the hand carrying the egg and flower, with a hallucinogenic effect. Narcissus is seen posing in the background before his change. Dalis preoccupation with hallucination and illusion inspired the ‘double images’ play.

8. Spider of the Evening (1940)

Here, Dali’s well-known landscape is barren. The olive tree, which represents calm, has been shorn of its leaves, and the Italianate figures in the background appear to be dancing the Sardana of death, their shapes and ballooning sleeves mimicking the languid forms sprawled across the foreground. Dark shadows, reminiscent of the evening, cling to the objects, creating a sense of loss. A winged putto, a symbol of love and artistic endeavors, sits sobbing in the lower left corner, lamenting the entire melting scene. This putto, reminiscent of Felicien Rops’ Pornocrates’ sobbing cupid, implies the significance of this artwork, which represents another type of pornography, war pornography. This piece depicts the emotional impact of immense human upheaval and is set in the ruins of World War II, which Dali and Gala had recently fled.

9. Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

Jim Linwood from London, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Gala, Dali’s wife, and muse, floats above a rock in a serene maritime setting. Aside from her naked body, two drops of water, a pomegranate, and a bee are also in the air. Gala’s dream, spurred by the buzzing of the bee, appears in the upper part of the canvas; there, an exploding pomegranate shoots forth a fish, from whose mouth two terrible tigers emerge, each holding a bayonet that, one second later, will wake Gala from her deep sleep. Although Dali was already residing in America and painting little by 1944, this piece represents a return to his ‘paranoiac-critical approach.’ His belief, based on Freudian theories, that images were subject to many interpretations propelled him to the forefront of the Surrealist movement.

10. The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946)

In this painting, temptation appears to Saint Anthony in the form of a horse in the foreground representing strength, sometimes also the symbol of voluptuousness, and in the form of the elephant that follows it, carrying on its back the golden cup of lust in which a naked woman stands precariously balanced on the fragile pedestal, a figure that emphasizes the composition’s erotic character. The other elephants are bearing structures, the first is an obelisk inspired by Bernini’s in Rome, while the second and third are Venetian edifices in the style of Palladio. In the background, another elephant carries a great tower with phallic overtones, while in the clouds, a few parts of the Escorial, an emblem of temporal and spiritual order, can be seen.

Read also; 10 interesting facts about Salvador Dali

11. The Elephants (1948)

Smiley.toerist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali’s artwork frequently features elephants. It initially appears in his 1944 book Dream Caused by a Bee Flying Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants are depicted ‘with long, multi-jointed, nearly invisible legs of yearning’ and obelisks on their backs, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk. These encumbrances, famous for their phallic implications, generate a sensation of phantom actuality when combined with the picture of their brittle legs. ‘The elephant is a distortion in space,’ according to one study, ‘its spindly legs contrasting the sense of weightlessness with structure.’

12. Galatea of the Spheres (1952)

Dali had a brilliant mathematical mind and has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci for his all-encompassing intellect and understanding of a wide range of subjects. Dali became interested in DNA structures during his nuclear mysticism phase. ‘Galatea of the Spheres‘ is an example of how an artist transforms a molecular structure into a visual parody, visually replicating the structure of DNA. It displays his interest in science and theories about atomic disintegration.

13. The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-1954)

Saimonsays1991, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory is a 25.4 × 33 cm oil on canvas re-creation of Dali’s iconic 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory. The original work’s landscape has been swamped with water in this variation. Disintegration portrays what is happening both above and below the surface of the water. Cadaques’ scenery is now floating above the water. The original plane and block have been separated into brick-like objects that float in relation to each other, with nothing binding them together. These depict the breakdown of matter into atoms, a quantum mechanics breakthrough.

The horns disappearing into the distance behind the bricks represent atomic missiles, emphasizing that, despite cosmic order, humanity is capable of bringing about its own doom. The clocks’ hands float above their dials, surrounded by many conical objects floating in parallel formations. There is now a fourth melting watch. The original painting’s twisted human face is morphing into another of the odd fish hovering above it.

14. The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955)

The Sacrament of the Last Supper stands apart from most of Salvador Dali’s other works due to its Christian subject matter, simplicity of arrangement, and lack of shock value. This 1955 scene is both holy and realistic. The background is Dali’s home on the Catalan coast of northeastern Spain. Although many of the bizarre forms in his earlier works were inspired by the steep cliffs and weathered stones of his home Catalonia, Dali employed the rough bay of Port Lligat as a plain backdrop here.

15. The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968-1970)

Salvador Dali, Painting of Abelard and Heloise, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Dali designed the Hallucinogenic Toreador in 1970, following the canons of his own interpretation of surrealist thinking. It is on display in the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. He conveys his wife’s disdain for bullfighting in this piece. He develops his unique visual language by blending symbolism, optical illusions, and strange yet recognizable images. Within this painting, his use of the paranoiac-critical style blends diverse motifs as an instructional example of his artistic creativity.

Read also; 15 Most Famous 20th Century Painters

These are 15 of the most renowned Salvador Dali paintings, one of today’s greatest and most celebrated painters. Dali was a Surrealist artist who was both famous and controversial. His paintings depict events that appear real but could never occur in the actual world.