Stylists: Dali had begun to paint (and behave) as a surrealist even before 1929.(art)

Dali continued his five finger exercises,coming to terms with the major aesthetic movements of the Modernist era,with the art of Seurat and Picasso,Matisse and Bonnard and Juan Gris,and many other contemporaries and mentors.He imitated and burlesqued Picasso,Matisse,himself but above all he worked constantly,fact which caused Dali's parents to worry that he was not living his youth to the full,remained with him at the Academy,where he pursued every ism with the thoroughness that lay in his nature.

"No one had ever seen Cubist paintings,and not a single one of my classmates envisaged the possibility of taking that kind of painting seriously.The professor of anatomy,who was much more given to the discipline of scientific methods,heard mention of the book in question,and asked me for it.He confessed that he had never seen paintings of this kind,but he said that one must respect everything one does not understand.Since this has been published in a book,it means that there is something to it.The following morning he had read the preface,and had understood it pretty well,he quoted to me several types of non-figurative and eminently geometrical representations in the past.I told him that this was not exactly the idea,for in Cubism there was a very manifest element of representation.The professor spoke to the other professors and all of them began to look upon me as a supernatural being."

Dali's unflappable confidence in his own superior understanding made him contemptuous of his tutors and fellow students.He felt he was "the only painter in Madrit to understand and execute Cubist paintings",that he hadalready outspripped the others: "the students thought me reactionary,an enemy of progress and of liberty.They called themselves revolutionaries and innovators,because they were allowed to paint as they pleased,and because they had just eliminated black from their palletes,calling it dirt,and replacing it with purple!Their most recent discovery was this:everything is made iridescent by light-no black,shdows are purple.This revolution of Impressionism was one which i had gone through at the age of twelve,and never at that time i had not committed the elementary error of suppressing black from my palette.[]
Contemptuous though he was Dali had the application of the true artist,and his early work is not to be despised,even if it remains true that the greatness of the mature Dali was a product of 1929.Dali had begun to paint (and behave) as a surrealist even before 1929.Guillemo de Torre,who got to know Dali in sudent residence in Madrit in 1923,wrote in the Madrit periodical Arte in 1933:
"His adventurous mind and hunger for discovery took him within five years,between adolescence and the full bloom of youth,though wast areas of the visual arts,different not only in their tenderies but indeed in their very natures".Later at the same year,he added:"The path Dali took,new and unique as it was,nonetheless was implied in what went before,and was not so utterly unpredictable.In him,even more than in his pictures,there is an instinctual force,a leaning to emotionalism,an uninhibited predilection for all things mysterious and adventurous,all so deep-rooted in him that he was inevitable predestined for the aweinspiring,imaginative fragmentation that Surrealism stands for.His rebelious spirit led him to force open the door to an unforeseen dimension,nor did he flinch from plunging headfirst into the Freudian realm of the dreams.[]In order to put this matter to the test Salvador Dali was willing to dispence with delicate brushwork and his customary virtuosity.Or rather,he grasped how to adapt them to the new structure and meaning of his pictures."

Venus 1925