My Favorite Artists and Their Art: Salvador Dalí

It's hard to describe the works of Salvador Dalí. He is an iconoclastic and controversial figure in the art world. Yet he's much more than that. Dalí's work holds a number of influences and inspirations that set him apart from other artists and make his works almost impossible to categorize. At first glance, he appears to be a surrealist, a modernist, a cubist, and a dadaist. But his paintings, collages, and bizarre three-dimensional works of art also owe much to classical and Renaissance masterpieces. Many critics and art lovers have dismissed Dalí because he was either too eccentric, too commercial, or because they simply failed to understand the pure talent and genius of his creations. On a personal level, I've always been attracted to these images, because they seem to have been born in dreams and were then expressed in a way that we could all experience them as vividly as Dalí himself.

The Persistence of Memory (1931)
















Raphaelesque Head Exploding (1951)



























Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
















The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)














The Enigma of Desire (1929)
















The Dream (1931)





















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
















Cubist Self-Portrait (1923)




























The Ants (1929)














Figure at the Window (1925)




























The Visage of War (1940)