Salvador Dali Knows What's Up

In Spanish class this year, as part of our unit on Spain, we discussed the life and works of various artists from that nation.  Salvador Dali in particular stuck out to me. His art was so deliciously weird that I couldn’t help but marvel at it. (And buy his 2014 calendar. Shh…)

            His painting Swans Reflecting Elephants, in the trademark surrealist style of realistically depicting the unreal, shows Dali with his back to a pond full swans whose reflections look like elephant heads. Thus, Dali illustrates that he does not subscribe to the societal belief that beauty (represented by the swans) reflects knowledge (represented by the elephants).

            And when Ms. Valentino posed a question about the relationship between truth and beauty this week, of course my most random of brains made the connection to this Dali painting. I began to muse on how society could believe that beauty reflects knowledge and/or truth. And then it hit me: the average Joes trust the beauty queens of society. I mean, celebrity endorsements work really well, and JFK—who had a much more glamorous persona than Richard Nixon—won the presidential debate according to TV watchers, but not according to radio listeners.

            I feel that Dali is right in many cases; a beautiful casing can lie and mask a truly rotten core. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Daisy’s beauty seems so pure and on a higher plane than anything Gatsby has ever known, but she lies through her teeth about her devotion to him.

            But then again, perhaps beauty can reflect truth. The great Romantic writers marveled at the purity and awesome power of nature and mused on how small it made us as humans; through beauty, they became enlightened.

            So the question becomes: how does one differentiate between the beauty of truth and the beauty of lies? I believe that only in beautifying our insides—bettering ourselves, reading, doing good deeds, learning to love the pure, honest, and moral—will we know the truly beautiful.

http://www.dali.com/blog/swans-reflecting-elephants-is-one-of-those-dali-paintings-everybody-loves/