Salvador Dali A flamboyant painter and sometime writer, sculptor and experimental film-maker, Salvador Dali was probably the greatest Surrealist artist, using bizarre dream imagery to create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner world. His most famous work is The Persistence Of Memory

Title: The Persistence Of Memory Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Surrealism To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.” Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.

Crepuscular Old Man,

Title: Discovery of America Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Reminiscence Archeologique De L'angelus Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Tiger Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Two Faces of Gala,

Surrealism as we know it today is closely related to some forms of abstract art. In fact, they shared similar origins, but they diverged on their interpretation of what those origins meant to the aesthetic of art. Dali embraced all the science of painting as a way to study the psyche through subconscious images. He called this process the Paranoiac Critical Method. As any paranoiac, the artist should allow these images to reach the conscience, and then do what the paranoiac cannot do: Freeze them on canvas to give consciousness the opportunity to comprehend their meaning. Later on, he expanded the process into the Oniric-Critical Method, in which the artist pays attention to his dreams, freezing them through art, and analyzing them as well. As Freud said, "A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened. Veristic Surrealists, saw academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity; as a way to freeze images that, if unrecorded, would easily dissolve once again into the unknown. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image, and the consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words.

Title: Clock Explosion Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937 Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Landscape with Butterflies Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Meditative Rose, 1958 Artist: Salvador Dali Salvador Dali

Title: The Elephants, 1948 Artist: Salvador DaliSalvador Dali

Title: Galatea of The Spheres, 1952