Salvador Dali & The Face of War-Rayne Rutherford
In 1940, Salvador Dalí created the oil painting The Face of War. In The Face of War, Dalí uses oil-based paints to depict war emotionally and psychologically. By this time, Salvador Dalí is a very well-known surrealist artist, often depicting unusual topics in a thought-provoking manner. Salvador Dalí is most known for the piece The Persistence of Memory, where he depicts an assortment of distorted clocks almost liquidly draped on objects. Salvador Dalí’s themes in his paintings are surrounded by a sense of allegory that can only best be described as recalling a dream. Dalí’s paintings are based on his real-life relationships, dreams, science, food, and sex, which correlate to the world's delicacies and details. His odd and at times eccentric personality adds to the awe and theatrics of his paintings and sculptures.
Salvador Dalí, specifically, made The Face of War in the context of the start of the Second World War. Salvador Dalí originally lived in Europe but moved around with his lover. In 1940, Dalí and his lover started getting ready to leave Europe during the turbulent times, but before they visited Dalí’s family in Spain. Dalí was greatly moved by the devastation he saw as he visited. After his visit, he leaves for America in 1940, where he begins painting The Face of War.
Salvador Dalí has a unique painting style that I believe is most seen in dreams. It has the detail and realism of something that someone can physically look at, but the actual subject of the painting is a mix of objects that have distorted features.
Salvador Dalí is a mixture of classical paintings riddled with allegories and hauntingly realism-type war paintings. Dalí uses subtle allegories alluding to the Greek mythology of Medusa’s decapitated yet still deadly head with snakes for hair. It is a subtle connection between the continuation of the destruction of people only through the repetition of death. In contrast to the old traditional style of depictions of war, Dalí also illustrates a quite vivid and direct depiction of the terrors of war. Goya’s etching in The Disasters of War series is a collection of disturbing etchings directly depicting graphic civilian brutality during the war. It was a groundbreaking type of artwork back in Goya’s time, as he was the first artist to depict the realistic horror and death of war. While Dalí does not directly show the brutality of war, they are both similarly disturbing and straight to the point. Both artists grab the user's uncomfortable attention, forcing them to confront the disturbing images. Goya nor Dalí dance around their clear objections to war by depicting scenes horrific yet captivating of the inhumanity and brutality of real-world wars just in different forms.
Salvador Dalí’s The Face of War painting is a horrific and graphic depiction of the impacts of war on the human mind. He focuses not on the physical damage that war can create but on the immense psychological turmoil. Dalí depicts a decapitated head grimacing toward the viewer, and in the head’s eye sockets and mouth, we can see smaller duplicate heads that reflect the larger image as the cycle repeats of these distressed heads almost screaming at the viewer infinitely. The implied infinity of sorrow and misery depicted by the withering heads relates to the horrors of war, connecting that like the heads screaming out in misery infinitely, war and violence will always continue erecting these emotions. This nightmarish scene goes past typical comprehension but allows the viewer to feel the unsettling dread of the painting, similar to a waking nightmare. The plain but lifeless background is not only meant to enhance the feeling of an isolated, withered environment but also alludes to the barren and desolate environment of war.
Dalí also uses the symbolism of Greek mythology to further demonstrate the carnage of death and destruction in war. Dalí references when Medusa’s decapitated head, still surrounded by snakes, was used as a weapon. Even through her death, Medusa could not rest, as she was used as a weapon of continual destruction, stuck with a scowl of misery and despair.
Dalí uses these elements to illustrate the fragmentation and decay the human mind goes through when faced with war. The centerpiece of the artwork, the withered and decapitated head, represents the psychological trauma represented by Dalí’s imagination. The isolation, sorrow, misery, and desolation are all thoroughly displayed in a haunting image, forcing the viewer to feel unsettled. Dalí purposely illustrates the dread and trauma of war psychologically rather than physically.
