Surrealist art was a major development in the twentieth century art world. Following on the heels of Impressionism and the horrors of World War I, art was liberated from traditional values and took a more imaginative and unstructured route. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the work of a Spanish painter named Salvador Dali.

Dali was born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904. As a child, his mother encouraged him to pursue his interest in art, leading Dali to take up drawing and painting lessons. When he continued his studies as a young adult, he drew attention for being both a dandy and a painter who experimented with new styles like Cubism and Dada. In 1926, Dali went to Paris and met one of his idols, Pablo Picasso. While in Paris, Dali developed a new method for tapping into his subconscious and creating fantastic images for his paintings. This became one of the early foundations of the Surrealist movement. In 1931, he produced one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. From then on, Dali became an artistic sensation across Europe and the United States, with both his paintings and his public antics drawing both uproar and interest.

As a leading Surrealist, Salvador Dali used extensive symbolism in the majority of his paintings. While often times his work was born out of elaborate dreams and personal reflections, Dali also drew inspiration from new developments in his time. He made use of the unconscious in keeping with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, and he sought to portray time and space as relative as based on Albert Einstein's theories and the new science of quantum mechanics. Several motifs recur in Dali's paintings, such as melting watches, eggs, and animals like elephants, ants, snails, and locusts.

One of Dali's most famous paintings, The Persistence of Memory, captures his entire range of style in a single distorted image. At first glance, what we see is a landscape dotted with a series of melting pocket watches accompanied by a distorted creature with enormous eyelashes. While some believe that the melting watches is a reference to Einstein's theory on the relativity of time, Dali explained that the inspiration came from watching cheese melt in the sun. As for the imagery itself, it's more evocative of being inside an actual dream. Everything is both clear as it would be in the real world and distorted as only imagination can provide. There is no clear focus or central subject. We can only allow ourselves to be swept up into the work as we would be into a bizarre dream.

You can see some of Salvador Dali's works at such galleries as the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain.

Image by Tony Hisgett on Flickr