The Surrealist movement Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Surrealist movement - Research Paper Example The essay "The Surrealist movement" analyzes surrealism. Unlike the romantics, the surrealists believed that they could find revelations on the street and in daily life. The ideas of the Surrealist with regard to the subconscious mind, their interests in primitivism and myth shaped the concepts adopted by the Abstract Expressionists. Salvador Dali, a surrealist painter, was born in Figueras, Catalonia-Spain in 1904. He studied art in different parts of Spain and mastered the effortless adaptation of various styles into his repertoire. As a teenager, he became fascinated with the concepts and ideals of psychologist Sigmund Freud. He liked how the subconscious mind and artistic works linked. This caused him to focus greatly heavily on his art content. He was also influenced by the works of the Paris Surrealists who painted from the subconscious mind with no definitive purpose in mind of how the outcome of the work should be. The Persistence of Memory is arguably one of the most famous works of Dali which he painted in 1931 while a relatively young man. The painting depicts a number of pocket watches that are detached from their chains, slowly melting on a tree branch and on rocks. It is quite deceptive to the eye because the scene is a fantasy that is placed in a lifelike setting of the ocean. The main aspect portrayed by the painting is that objects known to be hard become inexplicably limp in the dreamscape. This has been interpreted to mean that things that appear strong and purposeful always reach a point.