Salvador Dalí: The usurped beauty

Abstract

This article seeks to show and gather various criteria that are concerned with understanding beauty from a multifaceted perspective, spanning the traditional to what can be understood as creative, abrupt, and controversial. On one hand, ugliness can arise from clear aesthetic enjoyment, like a scream that shocks the standards of beauty. On the other hand, beauty becomes an ambiguous and nihilistic entity, oscillating between opposite poles, which triggers different reactions in the viewer, and it is mainly how different art trends elaborate their content. Dali does not escape this phenomenon and his art reflects this aesthetic ambivalence; which will be analyzed in several of his works.