Portrait Of My Dead Brother

Text: Portrait of My Dead Brother is an oil painting executed on a 69 inch by 69 inch piece of canvas. This is the most common medium for Dali as well as for other artists in this time period. The main focus of this piece is Dali’s late brother. To the lower right hand side of the painting there are what appear to be soldiers holding lances, a long pointed weapon primarily used by knights. To the left hand side there is a recreation of The Angelus. It is believed that Dali added this to the portrait to depict the basket as the brother’s coffin. This portrait morphs Dali and Dali’s brother together with the use falling cherries. It is said that the dark cherries form Dali’s late brother and the orange hued cherries form Dali. At a closer glance,
Dali’s brother died just nine months before the birth of Dali. The brother’s name was also Salvador. When Dali was young, his parents took him to his brother’s grave. At the gravesite they told him he was the reincarnation of his brother and Dali believed them. At this late point in his life this portrait is done with a dot matrix, a commonly used style in the pop art movement of the sixties. A dot matrix is a configuration of several dots to create a larger image. Dali uses this style in several of his works. Dali likes to integrate several different objects into his work and I believe this is why he likes to use dot matrixes. A dot matrix is essential in blending objects together in a covert way. Dot matrixes are highly compared to the printing dots on a newspaper. In the sixties, pop art was a major style artists used. Pop art can be referred to as anti-art and is an extension of the dada era. Portrait of My Dead Brother is not characterized as being pop art because its subject is not a popular culture topic; although, it is done in a style related to the pop art
He studied the works of monumental artists such as Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. His earliest works reflect the realism style because he viewed the world as perfection. Around the 1920s Dali was evolving into a cubist and not a realist. This period in his art was thoroughly influenced by Picasso, who he met in 1929. Salvador Dali grew from cubism to surrealism in a short period of time and stayed a surrealist until his late 30s when he turned to a more supernatural view and began painting more religious pieces. During his time as a surrealist, Dali created the paranoiac-critical method. This method of creating art trains your brain to link objects together in an irrational way. Not only was Dali evolving through related styles of art, but he was also heavily influenced by science, more specifically molecules. Dali used these molecules within his dot-matrices. Dali continually used science and the paranoiac-critical method until his death in