Even if you don’t know Salvador Dali by name you’re probably familiar with his work. You likely have a vague melty recollection of his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory. Dali is notable here at Snuzzy because, like us, he was inspired by animals; his paintings often contained weird abstracted mammalian forms, soaring birds and hatching eggs. He was also photographed doing normal things with weird animals and doing weird things with normal animals.
This relatively famous photograph of Dali was a collaboration between himself and artist Philippe Halsman. It’s part of a series of photographs called “Dalí Atomica” inspired by Dali’s own painting Leda Atomic. The photograph of Dali with the flying cats and water attempts to capture the dynamic weightlessness of Leda Atomica’s image of a floating woman entangled with a swan:
For a period he was obsessed with the form of anteaters. Many of his paintings feature long slender figures with strange proportions that seem both alien and organic. To achieve this he studied live anteaters and was even seen walking around New York City in the ’60s with an anteater on a leash.
Dali even observed how the forms of animals match the work of others. In this movie, he notes how the shape of the woman in Vermeer’s The Lacemaker mimics a rhinoceros’s horn:
Can’t see the video in your reader? Watch it here.
It’s a real shame he died in the ’80s, before the Internet’s obsession with animals came to fruition. Who knows how high he could have soared with Keyboard Cat on his side. As fellow animal lovers, Snuzzy salutes him!
I am eccentric. It takes one to know one. I am an artist. Artists are strange. Dali was the biggest weirdo of them all. I cannot imagine walking out of a subway with an anteater on a leash and a straight face.
Dali and animals http://snuzzy.com/salvador-dali-inspired-by-animals/
Dali e os animais http://snuzzy.com/salvador-dali-inspired-by-animals/
[...] )); }); Wow, this looks like a photograph of the inside of Dali’s brain. (via anniccck) Posted: May, 10 2010 Filed under: Alien, Resplendent, nature [...]
My favorite animal painting from Dali is One Second Before Awakening from a Dream – there is a fish eating a tiger who is eating another tiger with an elephant on stilts on the background. Doesn’t get much odder than that.