Salvador Dali in Les Baux-de-Provence: Gala's Dream

Dali as He Is

For Dali, staging and self-representation are at the heart of the process of creation and expression. Dali is not born; he comes to life, like a god fallen from an Iberian Olympus, to teach and, above all, to be at the center of everything.

Spanish Messiah

Make no mistake, Dali self-crowned from his first paintings. Never has self-representation been so central to a painter's early works. When he does not include himself, as in The Last Supper where he boldly gives Christ his own features, he paints the landscapes of his childhood, coloring them with the mythical hues of his arrival into the world!

Salvador Dali in Les Baux-de-Provence: The Last Supper (detail)

Salvador Dalí in Les Baux-de-Provence: Millet's Angelus

The World of Art

While he discovered Impressionism early on, falling in love with it while simultaneously questioning this love, he never ceased to want to know what others are doing everywhere. It must be understood that Dalí is an informed painter who takes a keen interest in what the great masters before him have done (he will not hesitate to reinvent the Venus de Milo or Millet's Angelus, for example), but also in what his contemporaries are doing.

At the Heart of Modernity

He would thus experiment with Cubism as early as the 1920s, then with Italian Futurism (which he would put through the mill of his perception), just as he would dissect the Dada movement. While Picasso is interested in the world and politics, Dalí follows the artistic flow! Throughout his life, he will feed his painting with the modernity that blossoms here and there …

Dalí in Les Baux: The Eye of the Andalusian Dog

Dalí in Les Baux: Dalí, Star of the Image

The World of Image

Thus, he ventured into cinema, notably with Buñuel and *Un Chien Andalou* in the 1930s, or he became, at the end of his life, one of the first celebrities to engage in television advertising. Dalí was and remains modern, perpetually attuned to art.

Dalí's Lands

Always close to the lands where he grew up, from Cape Creus to the plains of Empordà, he only truly left his country from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until 1948. Dalí embodied these lands. Thus, he managed to associate the (obviously mythical) places of his childhood, both in his writings and in his paintings, with eroticism and mysticism.

Dalí at Les Baux: Dalí and Gala Puppeteers

Dalí at Les Baux: The New City

Landscapes

Dalí early on gave an anthropomorphic interpretation to the reliefs and landscapes. A valley became a lower back, a desert inspired him with a religious melancholy. It is through this vision that he endowed empty places with a human aura. All Dalí's landscapes are narrators that tell us about his isolation, his passion (for Gala), his romanticism, or his fears. Before embodying everyday objects, he gave the Earth a soul and adorned it with character.

Visionary

In the same vein, he often portrayed great mythical figures by reinventing them: from Don Quixote to Lincoln, from Lady Godiva to Saint Anthony. He merges his eye with a known story to reinvent what is important from what is not. He can also transform a body so that it becomes a mountain or a tree... Thus, he completes the circle; the mineral is alive, and the body becomes stone! Dalí does not establish a strict separation between landscape, subject, human, or environment. It is a whole that participates in a vision, an ensemble, which is the world according to Dalí!

© Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER & Agnès CARA-RIBAS for PASSION ESTAMPES

Dalí at Les Baux - Gala