The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

10.1(A), 10.1(D), 10.2(B), 10.3, 10.4(D), 10.4(E), 10.4(F), 10.4(G), 10.4(H), 10.4(I), 10.5(C), 10.5(D), 10.5(E), 10.5(G), 10.5(H), 10.5(I), 10.8(A), 10.9(B)(i), 10.10(B), 10.10(C), 10.11(F)

Lesson Standards

Students will identify key events from Dali's life and explain how they influenced his art.

We will explore the life of Salvador Dali, unraveling the mysteries behind his iconic art, gained a deeper understanding of Salvador Dali's life and work, and will be able to articulate the significance of his contributions to the surrealist movement and the art world.

I will use academic language to discuss the life of Salvador Dali, employing vocabulary related to art, surrealism, and autobiography.

Success Criteria

Learning Intention

Language Objective

What will our Learning look like today?

• This painting by Salvador Dali is called "The Persitence of Memory.
• Jot down some thoughts in the chat about what you might think the painting represents.

Do Now:

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was a world-famous artist from Catalonia, Spain. Highly influenced by the writing of Sigmund Freud—in particular, Freud’s work on the significance of the subconscious—Dalí’s art helped to define an avant garde 20th-century artistic movement known as Surrealism. Like other Surrealists, Dalí believed that the subconscious world held a greater importance than the world of the conscious mind. In this excerpt from his autobiography, he talks about attending the local communal school led by the eccentric Señor Traite, a person of “mythical prestige.” He also recalls the ways in which, early on, he felt separate from other “typical” children, exploring his mind as a child and the powerful ways in which “revery and myth began to mingle.” *Watch StudySync Video

Introduction

immaculate

enormous

completely neat and clean

to cause someone to believe or agree that something is true; to persuade

convince

chastise

appropriate

extraordinarily large in size, extent, amount, power, or degree

to scold

suitable for a particular person, place, or condition

Vocabulary

• Dalì is one of the most famous painters of all time. He is best remembered for his quirky, surrealist style, which also characterizes his writing. In addition to painting and writing both fiction and nonfiction, he constructed scenery for stage plays, produced films, created costumes, and made prints and photographs.
• Dalì went out of his way throughout his life to surprise people and challenge their thinking. For instance, he once delivered a lecture dressed in a wetsuit, carrying a billiard cue, and walking a pair of Russian wolfhounds.
• Dalì had a problematic relationship with his strict father and often conflicted with authority figures thereafter. He was thrown out of art school shortly before final exams for saying none of the teachers were competent to examine him. Similarly, he was expelled from the surrealist movement for political reasons and an ongoing conflict with its leader, André Breton.

Context & History

Salvador Dali wondered why his parents sent him to Señor Traite’s, where he attended class with the poorest children of the town, some of whom went about in ragged espadrilles during the winter months. Dali’s fancy clothes and the perfume in his delicately combed hair fascinated these kids. In turn, he was fascinated by the way they could make toys out of folded pieces of paper or how easily they could tie their shoes. Dali himself barely knew how to use a door handle and got lost whenever he entered any house. As for Señor Traite, he spent most of the year napping and taking snuff. To pass the time, Dali began to fabricate memories—such as a naked child with a swarm of ants upon his buttocks. Since then, a lot of these memories became confused with real ones. The way he kept them straight is by remembering that although many of his memories took place there, he had never been to Russia.

Summary

Chapter Four False Childhood Memories Why had my parents chosen a school with so sensational a master as Señor Traite? My father, who was a free-thinker, and who had sprung from sentimental Barcelona, the Barcelona of “Clavé choirs,” the anarchists and the Ferrer trial, made it a matter of principle not to put me into the Christian schools or those of the Marist brothers, which would have been appropriate for people of our rank, my father being a notary and one of the most esteemed men of the town. In spite of this he was absolutely determined to put me into the communal school—Señor Traite’s school. This attitude was regarded as a real eccentricity, only partly justified by the mythical prestige of Señor Traite, of whose pedagogical gifts none of my parents’ acquaintances had the slightest personal experience, since they had all raised their children elsewhere.I therefore spent my first school year living with the poorest children of the town, which was very important, I think, for the development of my natural tendencies to megalomania. Indeed I became more and more used to considering myself, a rich child, as something precious, delicate, and absolutely different from all the ragged children who surrounded me. I was the only one to bring hot milk and cocoa put up in a magnificent thermos bottle wrapped in a cloth

embroidered with my initials. I alone had an immaculate bandage put on the slightest scratch, I alone wore a sailor suit with insignia embroidered in thick gold on the sleeves, and stars on my cap, I alone had hair that was combed a thousand times and that smelt good of a perfume that must have seemed so troubling to the other children who would take turns coming up to me to get a better sniff of my privileged head. I was the only one, moreover, who wore well-shined shoes with silver buttons. These became, each time one of them got torn off, the occasion of a tussle for its possession among my schoolmates who in spite of the winter went barefoot or half shod with the gaping remnants of foul, unmatched and ill-fitted espadrilles. Moreover, and especially, I was the only one who never would play, who never would talk with anyone. For that matter my schoolmates, too, considered me so much apart that they would only come near me with some misgivings in order to admire at close range a lace handkerchief that bloomed from my pocket, or my slender and flexible new bamboo cane adorned with a silver dog’s head by way of a handle.What, then, did I do during a whole year in this wretched state school? Around my solitary silence the other children disported themselves, possessed by a frenzy of continual turbulence. This spectacle appeared to me wholly incomprehensible. They shouted, played, fought, cried,

laughed, hastening with all the obscure avidity of being to tear out pieces of living flesh with their teeth and nails, displaying that common and ancestral dementia which slumbers within every healthy biological specimen and which is the normal nourishment, appropriate to the practical and animal development of the “principle of action.” How far was I from this development of the “practical principle of action"–at the other pole, in fact! I was headed, rather, in the opposite direction: each day I knew less well how to do each thing! I admired the ingenuity of all those little beings possessed by the demon of all the wiles and capable of skillfully repairing their broken pencil-boxes with the use of small nails! And the complicated figures they could make by folding a piece of paper! With what dexterity and rapidity they would undo the most stubborn laces of their espadrilles, whereas I was capable of remaining locked up in a room a whole afternoon, not knowing how to turn the door-handle to get out; I would get lost as soon as I got into any house, even those I was most familiar with; I couldn’t even manage by myself to take off my sailor blouse which slipped over the head, a few experiments in this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation. “Practical activity” was my enemy and the objects of the external world became beings that were daily more terrifying.What, then, did I do during a whole year in this wretched state school? Around my solitary

silence the other children disported themselves, possessed by a frenzy of continual turbulence. This spectacle appeared to me wholly incomprehensible. They shouted, played, fought, cried, laughed, hastening with all the obscure avidity of being to tear out pieces of living flesh with their teeth and nails, displaying that common and ancestral dementia which slumbers within every healthy biological specimen and which is the normal nourishment, appropriate to the practical and animal development of the “principle of action.” How far was I from this development of the “practical principle of action"–at the other pole, in fact! I was headed, rather, in the opposite direction: each day I knew less well how to do each thing! I admired the ingenuity of all those little beings possessed by the demon of all the wiles and capable of skillfully repairing their broken pencil-boxes with the use of small nails! And the complicated figures they could make by folding a piece of paper! With what dexterity and rapidity they would undo the most stubborn laces of their espadrilles, whereas I was capable of remaining locked up in a room a whole afternoon, not knowing how to turn the door-handle to get out; I would get lost as soon as I got into any house, even those I was most familiar with; I couldn’t even manage by myself to take off my sailor blouse which slipped over the head, a few experiments in this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation. “Practical activity” was my enemy and the objects of the external world became beings that

were daily more terrifying. Señor Traite, too, seated on the height of his wooden platform, wove his chain of slumbers with a consciousness more and more akin to the vegetable, and if at times his dreams seemed to rock him with the gentleness of reeds bowing in the wind, at other moments he became as heavy as a tree-trunk. He would take advantage of his brief awakenings to reach for a pinch of snuff and to chastise, by pulling their ears till they bled, those going beyond the limit of the usual uproar who either by an adroitly aimed wad of spittle or by a fire kindled with books to roast chestnuts managed to anticipate his normal awakening with a disagreeable jolt. What, I repeat, did I do during a whole year in this wretched school? One single thing, and this I did with desperate eagerness: I fabricated “false memories.” The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look most real, the most brilliant. Already at this period I remembered a scene which, by its improbability, must be considered as my first false memory. I was looking at a naked child who was being washed; I do not remember the child’s sex, but I observed on one of its buttocks a horrible swarming mass of ants which seemed to be stationary in a hole the size of an orange. In the midst of the ablutions the child was turned round with its belly upward and I

then thought that the ants would be crushed and that the hole would hurt it. The child was once more put back into its original position. My curiosity to see the ants again was enormous, but I was surprised that they were no longer there, just as there was no longer a trace of a hole. This false memory is very clear, although I cannot localize it in time. On the other hand, I am perfectly sure that it was between the ages of seven and eight while I was at Señor Traite’s school, forgetting the letters of the alphabet and the way to spell my name, that the growing and all-powerful sway of revery and myth began to mingle in such a continuous and imperious way with the life of every moment that later it has often become impossible for me to know where reality begins and the imaginary ends. My memory has welded the whole into such a homogenous and indestructible mass that only a critically objective examination of certain events that are too absurd or clearly impossible obliges me to consider them as authentic false memories. For instance, when one of my memories pertains to events happening in Russia I am after all forced to catalogue it as false, since I have never been in that country in my life. And it is indeed to Russia that certain false memories go back.

Thanks!