Salvador Dali was a devotee of Giorgio de Chirico. You can see why. Chirico's work looked to have found the building blocks of reality in unfinished mannequins and eerily sunny streets.
Chirico, a modernist before the war, became an outspoken opponent of modernism and a conservative painter The weird thing is that his art didn't look much different on either side of the time gap.
2 comments:
In his use of form and shapes I see what you mean about the influence Giorgio de Chirico had on Salvador Dali, albeit Dali was considerably more playful. I also like the subdued color combinations he chose to employ.
I looked at a number of his pictures this afternoon and you're absolutely right the work he did after his change of heart about modern art did look the same as the early stuff. Part of that might be because he often reverted to his earlier more popular style in order to earn a living.
Playfulness was a big part of who Salvador Dali was as an artist. It's part of the reason everyone associates him with surrealism although he was only part of the group for a few years. (Andre Breton was a bit of a tyrant.) Chirico had a very good sense of how colors work together.
My interpretation was that modernism and classicism weren't entirely opposed, at times being more rhetorical opposites than anything else. It probably is true that he gave clients what they wanted, though.
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