Painted with exceptional coloration and meticulous detail, Salvador Dali’s “Landscape with Butterflies” creates a disquieting ambiguity from its lack of familiar objects with which to give the work a sense of scale or proportions, making the butterflies appear abnormally large. A master of the Surrealist movement, Dali (1904 – 1989) worked in a broad range of styles and mediums, depicting symbolically complex dream imagery and everyday objects in unexpected forms. Profoundly influenced by Sigmund Freud, Dali pioneered the Paranoiac-Critical style of accessing the subconscious for greater creative expression.

Dali Landscape with Butterflies,During this period, Salvador Dalí never stopped writing, wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.In 1941, Dalì drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. In 1942, Salvador dali published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Salvador dali wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943. Therein Salvador dali expounded, Salvador dalí paintings.

In order “properly” to critique any given artwork (in a way that is acceptable by any institution assigning four-digit numbers to its classes), you need only remember the acronym “DAIJ.” It stands for "Description, Analysis, Interpretation, Judgment,” or as a clever student in my highschool art class once said, “Dem Apples Is Juicy.”  For an example, I have randomly chosen an artwork to critique by taking a lame, five-second-long quiz, entitled What Famous Work of Art Are You?…the result of which, for me, was Salvador Dali’s “Landscape With Butterflies.” (Okay, so I’m not crazy about butterflies, but the opinion part comes later.)