Salvador Dali was famously arrogant and selfish, though this would prove to be key to his success. Few would be able to make a success of the new surrealism art movement without great inner confidence, as he was to become the most famous member to come from this group. Of course, others did well too, but even those with little interest in art can tell you a little about Dali, normally his style of painting and also his extrovert character. His self portraits help us to learn more about how he viewed himself, and he had a complex relationship in truth. He worked within a number of other art movements besides surrealism, and so we have been gifted with his image in a variety of manners, including the cubist item found in this page. He worked within impressionism too at his youngest, but obviously this would not make use of portraiture.
The artwork captured in this page was titled Cubist Self Portrait, and dates from 1923. This artist also featured in huge numbers of photographs, particularly from his time in the United States, a country which fully embraced and encouraged his outgoing personality. He was the face of many an issue of magazine, at a time when television was in its infancy. He loved the attention and immediately fell in love with this young country. He now has his own museum dedicated to his career in Florida. He also made large amounts of money from posing for photographs, sometimes on his own, other times with friends or family. The archive of these provide another insight into his life and the development that he made from young boy in a rural town to an international art icon.
The other self portrait featured in this page was titled Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon and continues Dali's habit of using melting items within his work. Most famously, of course, he used melting clocks, but in this case it is his own face which slowly falls apart whilst held up on a plinth. Quite why he was using bacon alongside, well it is another example of his dreamlike world where anything was possible, and this surrealist approach was hugely popular at the time, and this is still the case today. We have chosen these two paintings are examples of the incredible variety with which he approached this genre, and the highly respected diversity of his oeuvre. His imagination would always take him in new directions and he allowed himself to follow whatever path it took him.
We have collated a list of self portrait paintings below from his extensive career, and in time we hope to tackle each and every one in greater detail but for now we have only covered two. Indeed, we plan to include his work in this genre across other artistic disciplines as well, as he was not limited to oil painting but also worked in furniture, jewellery and film too.
- Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon
- Self-portrait (Figueres)
- Self-Portrait with Raphaelesque Neck
- Self-portrait with L'Humanitie
- Cubist Self-Portrait
- Sick Boy (Self-portrait in Cadaqués)
- Self-Portrait in the Studio
- The Whole Dali in a Face
- Self-Portrait (Photomontage with the famous 'Mao-Marilyn' that Philippe Halsman created at Dali's wish)
- Dali's Moustache
- The Sun of Dali
- Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was the Grasshopper Child
- Macrophotographic Self-Portrait with the Appearance of Gala
- Self-Portrait Being Duplicated into Three
- Dali at the Age of Six When He Thought He Was a Girl Lifting the Skin of the Water to See the Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea
