| This dissertation examines Salvador Dali's artistic production during an eight-year period of exile in America from 1940 to 1948. It focuses on Dali's use of fragments and ruins in his paintings and collages from this period. Specifically, I investigate the artist's creation of a visual language that brings ruins, fragmentation, popular culture, anachronism, and the outmoded into dialogue as a way to articulate a critique of modernism. Although studies of Dali's work have looked into his Surrealist period, his incursion into the realm of popular culture, and the artist's antics as a pseudo-celebrity, few have considered rigorously the visual works produced during his stay in America, despite the fact that Dali became one of the most recognized Surrealists in the United States.;Based mostly on close analyses and observations of a selection of paintings and collages as case studies, the study combines that approach with careful attention to archival materials, unpublished correspondence, period criticism, and the artist's own writings. The intention of this dissertation is to situate the work of one of the most influential and complex artists of the twentieth century within an analytical framework shaped in part by recent theorists and art historians while constructing an original and innovative reading of the images and their function in their original context. |
