biography of salvador dali

Salvador Dalí

Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.

(1904-1989)

Who Was Salvador Dalí?

Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary. Dalí's father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Dalí in his art and early eccentricities.

It has been said that young Dalí was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates. Consequently, Dalí was subjected to furious acts of cruelty by more dominant students or his father. The elder Dalí wouldn't tolerate his son's outbursts or eccentricities and punished him severely. Their relationship deteriorated when Dalí was still young, exacerbated by competition between he and his father for Felipa's affection.

Dalí had an older brother, born nine months before him, also named Salvador, who died of gastroenteritis. Later in his life, Dalí often related the story that when he was 5 years old, his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother's reincarnation. In the metaphysical prose he frequently used, Dalí recalled, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute."

Dalí, along with his younger sister Ana Maria and his parents, often spent time at their summer home in the coastal village of Cadaques. At an early age, Dalí was producing highly sophisticated drawings, and both of his parents strongly supported his artistic talent. It was here that his parents built him an art studio before he entered art school.

Upon recognizing his immense talent, Dalí's parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream in class and stand out as the class eccentric, wearing odd clothing and long hair. After that first year at art school, he discovered modern painting in Cadaques while vacationing with his family. There, he also met Ramon Pichot, a local artist who frequently visited Paris. The following year, his father organized an exhibition of Dalí's charcoal drawings in the family home. By 1919, the young artist had his first public exhibition, at the Municipal Theatre of Figueres.

In 1921, Dalí's mother, Felipa, died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old at the time and was devastated by the loss. His father married his deceased wife's sister, which did not endear the younger Dalí any closer to his father, though he respected his aunt. Father and son would battle over many different issues throughout their lives, until the elder Dalí's death.

Art School and Surrealism

In 1922, Dalí enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He stayed at the school's student residence and soon brought his eccentricity to a new level, growing long hair and sideburns, and dressing in the style of English Aesthetes of the late 19th century. During this time, he was influenced by several different artistic styles, including Metaphysics and Cubism, which earned him attention from his fellow students—though he probably didn't yet understand the Cubist movement entirely.

In 1923, Dalí was suspended from the academy for criticizing his teachers and allegedly starting a riot among students over the academy's choice of a professorship. That same year, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Gerona for allegedly supporting the Separatist movement, though Dalí was actually apolitical at the time (and remained so throughout most of his life). He returned to the academy in 1926, but was permanently expelled shortly before his final exams for declaring that no member of the faculty was competent enough to examine him.

While in school, Dalí began exploring many forms of art including classical painters like Raphael, Bronzino and Diego Velázquez (from whom he adopted his signature curled moustache). He also dabbled in avant-garde art movements such as Dada, a post-World War I anti-establishment movement. While Dalí's apolitical outlook on life prevented him from becoming a strict follower, the Dada philosophy influenced his work throughout his life.

In between 1926 and 1929, Dalí made several trips to Paris, where he met with influential painters and intellectuals such as Picasso, whom he revered. During this time, Dalí painted a number of works that displayed Picasso's influence. He also met Joan Miró, the Spanish painter and sculptor who, along with poet Paul Éluard and painter Magritte, introduced Dalí to Surrealism. By this time, Dalí was working with styles of Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism. Dalí's paintings became associated with three general themes: 1) man's universe and sensations, 2) sexual symbolism and 3) ideographic imagery.

All of this experimentation led to Dalí's first Surrealistic period in 1929. These oil paintings were small collages of his dream images. His work employed a meticulous classical technique, influenced by Renaissance artists, that contradicted the "unreal dream" space that he created with strange hallucinatory characters. Even before this period, Dalí was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Dalí's major contribution to the Surrealist movement was what he called the "paranoiac-critical method," a mental exercise of accessing the subconscious to enhance artistic creativity. Dalí would use the method to create a reality from his dreams and subconscious thoughts, thus mentally changing reality to what he wanted it to be and not necessarily what it was. For Dalí, it became a way of life.

In 1929, Dalí expanded his artistic exploration into the world of film-making when he collaborated with Luis Buñuel on two films, Un Chien andalou ( An Andalusian Dog ) and L'Age d'or ( The Golden Age , 1930), the former of which is known for its opening scene—a simulated slashing of a human eye by a razor. Dalí's art appeared several years later in another film, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Dalí's paintings were used in a dream sequence in the film, and aided the plot by giving clues to solving the secret to character John Ballantine's psychological problems.

In August 1929, Dalí met Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova (sometimes written as Elena Ivanorna Diakonova), a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. At the time, she was the wife of Surrealist writer Paul Éluard. A strong mental and physical attraction developed between Dalí and Diakonova, and she soon left Éluard for her new lover. Also known as "Gala," Diakonova was Dalí's muse and inspiration, and would eventually become his wife. She helped balance—or one might say counterbalance —the creative forces in Dalí's life. With his wild expressions and fantasies, he wasn't capable of dealing with the business side of being an artist. Gala took care of his legal and financial matters, and negotiated contracts with dealers and exhibition promoters. The two were married in a civil ceremony in 1934.

By 1930, Dalí had become a notorious figure of the Surrealist movement. Marie-Laure de Noailles and Viscount and Viscountess Charles were his first patrons. French aristocrats, both husband and wife invested heavily in avant-garde art in the early 20th century. One of Dalí's most famous paintings produced at this time—and perhaps the best-known Surrealist work—was The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting, sometimes called Soft Watches , shows melting pocket watches in a landscape setting. It is said that the painting conveys several ideas within the image, chiefly that time is not rigid and everything is destructible.

By the mid-1930s, Dalí had become as notorious for his colorful personality as his artwork, and, for some art critics, the former was overshadowing the latter. Often sporting an exaggeratedly long mustache, a cape and a walking stick, Dalí's public appearances exhibited some unusual behavior. In 1934, art dealer Julian Levy introduced Dalí to America in a New York exhibition that caused quite a lot of controversy. At a ball held in his honor, Dalí, in characteristic flamboyant style, appeared wearing a glass case across his chest which contained a brassiere.

Expulsion from the Surrealists

As war approached in Europe, specifically in Spain, Dalí clashed with members of the Surrealist movement. In a "trial" held in 1934, he was expelled from the group. He had refused to take a stance against Spanish militant Francisco Franco (while Surrealist artists like Luis Buñuel, Picasso and Miró had), but it's unclear whether this directly led to his expulsion. Officially, Dalí was notified that his expulsion was due to repeated "counter-revolutionary activity involving the celebration of fascism under Adolf Hitler ." It is also likely that members of the movement were aghast at some of Dalí's public antics. However, some art historians believe that his expulsion had been driven more by his feud with Surrealist leader André Breton.

Despite his expulsion from the movement, Dalí continued to participate in several international Surrealist exhibitions into the 1940s. At the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936, he delivered a lecture titled "Fantomes paranoiaques athentiques" ("Authentic paranoid ghosts") while dressed in a wetsuit, carrying a billiard cue and walking a pair of Russian wolfhounds. He later said that his attire was a depiction of "plunging into the depths" of the human mind.

During World War II, Dalí and his wife moved to the United States. They remained there until 1948, when they moved back to his beloved Catalonia. These were important years for Dalí. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his own retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed by the publication of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). Also during this time, Dalí's focus moved away from Surrealism and into his classical period. His feud with members of the Surrealist movement continued, but Dalí seemed undaunted. His ever-expanding mind had ventured into new subjects.

The Dalí Theatre-Museum

Over the next 15 years, Dalí painted a series of 19 large canvases that included scientific, historical or religious themes. He often called this period "Nuclear Mysticism." During this time, his artwork took on a technical brilliance combining meticulous detail with fantastic and limitless imagination. He would incorporate optical illusions, holography and geometry within his paintings. Much of his work contained images depicting divine geometry, the DNA, the Hyper Cube and religious themes of Chastity.

From 1960 to 1974, Dalí dedicated much of his time to creating the Teatro-Museo Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum) in Figueres. The museum's building had formerly housed the Municipal Theatre of Figueres, where Dalí saw his public exhibition at the age of 14 (the original 19th century structure had been destroyed near the end of the Spanish Civil War). Located across the street from the Teatro-Museo Dalí is the Church of Sant Pere, where Dalí was baptized and received his first communion (his funeral would later be held there as well), and just three blocks away is the house where he was born.

The Teatro-Museo Dalí officially opened in 1974. The new building was formed from the ruins of the old and based on one of Dalí's designs, and is billed as the world's largest Surrealist structure, containing a series of spaces that form a single artistic object where each element is an inextricable part of the whole. The site is also known for housing the broadest range of work by the artist, from his earliest artistic experiences to works that he created during the last years of this life. Several works on permanent display were created expressly for the museum.

Also in 1974, Dalí dissolved his business relationship with manager Peter Moore. As a result, all rights to his collection were sold without his permission by other business managers and he lost much of his wealth. Two wealthy American art collectors, A. Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, who had known Dalí since 1942, set up an organization called "Friends of Dalí" and a foundation to help boost the artist's finances. The organization also established the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Final Years

In 1980, Dalí was forced to retire from painting due to a motor disorder that caused permanent trembling and weakness in his hands. No longer able to hold a paint brush, he'd lost the ability to express himself the way he knew best. More tragedy struck in 1982, when Dalí's beloved wife and friend, Gala, died. The two events sent him into a deep depression. He moved to Pubol, in a castle that he had purchased and remodeled for Gala, possibly to hide from the public or, as some speculate, to die. In 1984, Dalí was severely burned in a fire. Due to his injuries, he was confined to wheelchair. Friends, patrons and fellow artists rescued him from the castle and returned him to Figueres, making him comfortable at the Teatro-Museo.

In November 1988, Dalí entered a hospital in Figueres with a failing heart. After a brief convalescence, he returned to the Teatro-Museo. On January 23, 1989, in the city of his birth, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. His funeral was held at the Teatro-Museo, where he was buried in a crypt.

Paternity Case and New Exhibition

On June 26, 2017, a judge in a Madrid court ordered that Dalí’s body be exhumed to settle a paternity case. A 61-year-old Spanish woman named María Pilar Abel Martínez claimed that her mother had an affair with the artist while she was working as a maid for his neighbors in Port Lligat, a town in northeastern Spain.

The judge ordered the artist’s body to be exhumed because of a "lack of other biological or personal remains" to compare to Martinez's DNA. The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, which manages Dalí’s estate, appealed the ruling, but the exhumation went ahead the following month. In September, results from the DNA tests revealed that Dalí was not father.

That October, the artist was back in the news with the announcement of an exhibition at the Dalí museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, to celebrate his friendship and collaboration with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. The two were known for the joint creation of a "lobster dress" worn by American socialite Wallis Simpson, who later married English King Edward VIII .

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Salvador Dalí
• Birth Year: 1904
• Birth date: May 11, 1904
• Birth City: Figueres
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Academia de San Fernando
• Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• The Teatro-Museo Dalí is billed as the world's largest Surrealist structure.
• The Teatro-Museo Dalí is the former site where Dalí had his first public exhibit. The church where he was baptized and later buried is located across the street, and he grew up three blocks away.
• Death Year: 1989
• Death date: January 23, 1989
• Death City: Figueres
• Death Country: Spain

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Salvador Dalí Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/salvador-dali
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 12, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

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Summary of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20 th century and the most famous Surrealist. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock . Dalí was renowned for his flamboyant personality and role of mischievous provocateur as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró . His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work.

Accomplishments

• Freudian theory underpins Dalí's attempts at forging a visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dalí achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.
• Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on blatantly autobiographical material and childhood memories, Dalí's work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.
• Dalí subscribed to Surrealist André Breton's theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for his own self-created system of tapping the unconscious termed "paranoiac critical," a state in which one could simulate delusion while maintaining one's sanity. Paradoxically defined by Dalí himself as a form of "irrational knowledge," this method was applied by his contemporaries, mostly Surrealists, to varied media, ranging from cinema to poetry to fashion.

The Life of Salvador Dalí

The self-assured Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." After, members of the Surrealists would have a tumultuous relationship with him, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him.

Important Art by Salvador Dalí

Un Chien Andalou

By the age of 24 Dalí had acquired an art education, been inspired by Picasso to practice his own interpretation of Cubism, and was beginning to utilize Surrealist concepts in his paintings. It was at this point that he joined film director Luis Buñuel to create something truly new - a film that radically veered from narrative tradition with its dream logic, non-sequential scenes, lack of plot and nod to Freudian free association. Un Chien Andalou recreates an ethereal setting in which images are presented in montaged clips in order to jostle reality and tap the unconscious, shocking the viewer awake. For example, in this clip we find a glaring cow's eye in a woman's eye socket soliciting feelings of discomfort. In the scene that follows, a razor blade slashes said eye in extreme close-up. The film turned out to be a sensation and gained Dalí entrance to the most creative group of Parisian artists at the time, The Surrealists. In fact, it's become known as the first Surrealist film yet remains paramount in the canon of experimental film to this day.

35mm Film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Great Masturbator

Central to the piece is a large distorted human face looking down upon a landscape, a familiar rocky shoreline scene reminiscent of Dalí's home in Catalonia. A nude female figure representing Dalí's new-at-the-time muse Gala rises from the head, symbolic of the type of fantasy a man would conjure while engaged in the practice suggested by the title. Her mouth near a male's crotch suggests impending fellatio while he seems to be literally "cut" at the knees from which he bleeds, a sign of a stifled sexuality. Other motifs in the painting include a grasshopper - a consistent beacon for sexual anxiety in Dalí's work, ants - elusion to decay and death, and an egg - representing fertility. The painting may represent Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse and his lifelong phobia of female genitalia right at the cross section of meeting and falling in love with Gala. When he was a young boy, Dalí's father exposed him to a book of explicit photos demonstrating the horrific effects of venereal disease, perpetuating traumatic associations of sex with morbidity and rot in his mind. It is said that Dalí was a virgin when he met Gala and that he later encouraged his wife to have affairs to satisfy her sexual desires. Later in life when his paintings turned to religious and philosophical themes, Dalí would tout chastity as a door to spirituality. This piece has been compared to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights .

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

The Persistence of Memory

This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts the fluidity of time as a series of melting watches, their forms described by Dalí as inspired by a surrealist perception of Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The distinction between hard and soft objects highlights Dalí's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay with which Dalí held unshakable fascination. Because the melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dalí, we might see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'

Dalí often recounted a memory of passing laborious hours at school as a child by focusing on a reproduction of the famous 1859 painting by Jean-François Millet The Angelus . In the classical piece, two farmers are depicted saying a devotional prayer moments after hearing a far-off dinner bell signal the end of their workday. In Dalí's homage, two curvaceous rock figures (another nod to the Catalonian landscape) rise at sunset; the one on the left is a female while the one on the right is male. The woman's form suggests the figure of a praying mantis, a species in which the female cannibalizes the male after copulation. The praying mantis was a predominant theme in Surrealist works signifying the conflicting feelings of attraction and despair within the realm of desire. As The Dalí Museum describes, "In his analysis of the painting's latent meaning, Dalí felt that the female was not only the dominant partner, but also posed a sexual threat to the male..." It can thus be inferred that Dalí saw the The Angelus painting as symbolic of the repression of the male by the female - an overhanging threat to male existence. In a number of works throughout his career, Dalí reused these two forms.

Oil on panel - The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

The Enigma of William Tell

The renowned legend of William Tell is about a man who is forced to put an apple on top of his son's head and to shoot an arrow through it. The story is a modern retelling of the Biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. Dalí takes this age-old tale further yet with a decidedly Freudian bent. Here, the man is holding a baby, and the baby has a lamb chop on its head. In a twist on the theme of paternal assault, the father figure is about to eat the baby, and the birds in the corner await the leftovers. Dalí had a tumultuous relationship with his family, which is hinted at upon canvas in many of his works. This piece is a fine example of how our dreams continually process such persistent dilemmas in our lives through montages of wild symbolism and subconscious representations. Dalí used a few other tools from his symbolic toolkit in this painting. The extended buttock has a sexualized/phallic connotation. The fact that it is held up by a crutch shows the father's weakness and need for assistance. At the time Dalí made this painting he was virtually disowned by his father for his relationship with Gala who is supposedly represented by the tiny nut and baby right next to the father's giant foot, in peril of being stomped out. This artwork also served as a bit of turning point in Dalí's relationship with the Surrealist group. The main Surrealists led by André Breton were leftist supporters of Lenin, while Dalí here gave the evil father figure Lenin's face. The Surrealists were highly upset by such depictions and started proceedings to try to kick Dalí out of their group.

Oil on canvas

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Dalí painted this work just prior to the start of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and said it was evidence of the prophetic power of his subconscious mind. He depicts the anxiety of the time, visually predicting the violence, horror, and doom many Spaniards felt during General Franco's later rule. Two grossly elongated and exaggerated figures struggle, locked in a tensely gruesome fight where neither seems to be the victor. To quote Dalí, the painting shows "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The boiled bean referenced in the title most likely refers to the simple stew that was eaten by the poverty-ridden citizens living through this difficult time in Spain. Dalí's composition manages to express his political outrage. He would later continue to paint about politics and war in a series of works on Hitler and his agreement with Lord Chamberlain of Britain. This image also brings to mind Pablo Picasso's masterwork on a similar topic, Guernica (1937).

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lobster Telephone

Dalí's Lobster Telephone is one of the most famous Surrealist objects ever created. The juxtaposition of two objects that have little to do with each other is a staple of Dada and Surrealist ideas. Here Dalí combines the telephone, an object meant to be held, intimately next to one's ear, with a large sharp-clawed lobster, its genitalia aligned with the mouthpiece. It presents a literal juxtaposition of a freakish underwater creature with a normal machine of daily life in the way of dream pairings, in which we are disconcertedly jarred from our reality and viscerally unnerved by the presence of things that make no sense on a conscious level. Dalí collector Edward James commissioned Lobster Telephone and had four made for his own house. James also commissioned Mae West's Lips sofa from Dalí, which is simply a very large pair of lips that serve as a couch. The sexual connotations of sitting down on a set of beautiful lips are easily conjured.

Steel, plaster, rubber, resin and paper - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

The Mae West Brooch

Dalí's renaissance-man mind was exceptionally creative and prolific and extended into many other fields beyond painting. For example, throughout his career, he designed enough pieces of jewelry to fill a museum. In The Mae West brooch, we find continued Surrealism in the way the teeth are literally pearls, sitting in a slightly plumped leer of a mouth, ever so slightly contorted as to make the viewer uneasy. Most designers in the world of fashion would not get away with such a warped play on perfection. But Dalí claimed that he was inspired by a clichéd phrase: "Poets of the ages, of all lands, write of ruby lips and teeth like pearls," as well as the smile of the brooch's namesake Hollywood star. Interestingly, New York art stars such as Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and countless others would go on to create renditions of famous, voluptuous lips in their own work.

Rubys and Pearls in setting - Dalí Jewels Museum, Figueres, Spain

In Voluptas Mors

At first glance at this photograph, the viewer sees a skull, but deeper observation reveals it is actually composed of seven nude female models. Dalí designed the precise sketch for this work and it took the photographer Philippe Halsman over three hours to realize the image. The photograph's title is loosely translated as "Voluptuous Death". Dalí said, "I value death greatly. After eroticism, it's the subject that interests me the most." The piece is an excellent example of Dalí's many experiments with optical effects and visual perception. Here one can see a skull or the seven nudes, but not both at the same time. The particularities of our individual, visual perception was something Dalí was very interested in because he felt we could find clues about our inner psyches through the different associations artwork evoked. He used these double-image experiments in dozens of works throughout much of his career. Halsman was an established photographer and photojournalist who holds the record for the largest number of Time magazine covers photographed by any one person. After meeting in 1941, Dalí and Halsman worked together for 37 years, until the end of Halsman's life. Their cooperation also produced the famous photograph Dalí Atomicus (1948), and the book Dalí's Mustache (1954), which featured 28 different photographs of the artist's iconic facial hair.

Gelatin silver print

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity

This painting documents Dalí's interest in exaggerating the representation of the female form and his use of abstracted backgrounds. The main force within the painting is clearly its sexual allusion: the rhinoceros horns, commonly used by Dalí, in this case are overtly phallic, both components of the central buttock and disparate images threatening to penetrate it. The painting's title offers a direct clue about the aggressively sexual tone of the work. Art history professor Elliot King was quoted in Dawn Ades' book Dalí as saying, "as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomize the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto) sodomized by her own constitution." The painting therefore reinforces Dalí's conflicting views toward women as mysterious objects of power, seduction, and fear. Dalí's preoccupation with the phallus was a central theme throughout his career, though the degrees to which his works were aggressive or passive differed period to period. This work, not so surprisingly, was owned by Hugh Heffner and hung in the entryway to the Playboy Mansion for a number of years before being sold in 2003.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

Dalí is said to have been a rather poor student in his early years, especially in mathematics. But as the first nuclear warheads exploded in Japan, Dalí became very passionate about atomic theory and related topics. This new interest coincided with a change in his artistic style, leading him back to the realm of classical techniques. The result were paintings that combined his earlier passions for Catholicism and Catalan culture with his new discoveries in math and science - he called this new art theory in his oeuvre "nuclear mysticism." Dalí became especially interested in representing the fourth dimension as can be seen in this work. We see the depiction of the familiar Crucifixion, but instead of painting a regular cross, Dalí uses a mathematical shape called the tesseract (also known as a hupercube). This tesseract is a representation of a four-dimensional cube, in a three-dimensional space, a rather advanced spatial concept. In fact, Dalí worked with Professor Thomas Banchoff of Brown University Mathematics for many years later in his career to solidify his knowledge. Interestingly, Dalí combined his interest in spatial mathematics with a growing personal struggle with religion. In later years, he expressed his feelings about Catholicism in this way: "I believe in God but I have no faith. Mathematics and science have indisputably proved that God must exist, but I don't believe it." With paintings such as Crucifixion , Dalí explores combing these two in one devotional representation. In fact, his painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) similarly deals with divine mathematics and is considered by many to be the greatest religious painting of the 20 th century.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Biography of Salvador Dalí

Dalí was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to a prosperous middle-class family. The family suffered greatly before the artist's birth, because their first son (also named Salvador) died quickly. The young artist was often told that he is the reincarnation of his dead brother - an idea that surely planted various ideas in the impressionable child. His larger-than-life persona blossomed early alongside his interest in art. He is claimed to have manifested random, hysterical, rage-filled outbursts toward his family and playmates.

From a very young age, Dalí found much inspiration in the surrounding Catalan environs of his childhood and many of its landscapes would become recurring motifs in his later key paintings. His lawyer father and his mother greatly nurtured his early interest in art. He had his first drawing lessons at age 10 and in his late teens was enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts, where he experimented with Impressionist and Pointillist styles. When he was a mere 16, Dalí lost his mother to breast cancer, which was according to him, "the greatest blow I had experienced in my life." When he was 19, his father hosted a solo exhibition of the young artist's technically exquisite charcoal drawings in the family home.

Early Training

In 1922 Dalí enrolled at the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Dalí fully came of age there and started to confidently inhabit his flamboyant and provocative persona. His eccentricity was notorious, and originally more renowned than his artwork. He kept his hair long and dressed in the style of English aesthetes from the 19 th century, complete with knee-length britches that earned him the title of a dandy. Artistically, he experimented with many different styles at the time, dabbling in whatever piqued his ravenous curiosity. He fell in with, and became close to, a group of leading artistic personalities that included filmmaker Luis Buñuel and poet Federico García Lorca . The residence itself was very progressive and exposed Dalí to the most important minds of the time such as Le Corbusier, Einstein, Calder and Stravinsky. Ultimately though, Dalí was expelled from the academy in 1926 for insulting one of his professors during his final examination before graduation.

Following his dismissal from school, Dalí went idle for a number of months. He then took a life-changing trip to Paris. He visited Pablo Picasso in his studio and found inspiration in what the Cubists were doing. He became greatly interested in Futurist attempts to recreate motion and show objects from simultaneous, multiple angles. He began studying the psychoanalytic concepts of Freud as well as metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico and Surrealists like Joan Miró , and consequently began using psychoanalytic methods of mining the subconscious to generate imagery. Over the course of the next year, Dalí would explore these concepts while working to consider a means of dramatically reinterpreting reality and altering perception. His first serious work of this style was Apparatus and Hand (1927), which contained the symbolic imagery and dreamlike landscape that would become Dalí's inimitable painting signature.

Mature Period

In 1928, Dalí partnered with the filmmaker Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) , a filmic meditation on abject obsessions and irrational imagery. The film's subject matter was so sexually and politically shocking that Dalí became infamous, causing quite a stir with the Parisian Surrealists. The Surrealists considered recruiting Dalí into their circle and, in 1929, sent Paul Eluard and his wife Gala , along with René Magritte and his wife Georgette, to visit Dalí in Cadaques. This was the first time Dalí and Gala would meet and shortly after the two began having an affair which eventually resulted in her divorce from Eluard. Gala, born in Russia as Elena Dmitrievna Diakona, became Dalí's lifelong, constant, and most important muse, as well as being his future wife, his greatest passion, and his business manager. Soon after this original meeting, Dalí moved to Paris, and was invited by André Breton to join the Surrealists .

Dalí ascribed to Breton's theory of automatism, in which an artist stifles conscious control over the creative process by allowing the unconscious mind and intuition to guide the work. Yet in the early 1930s, Dalí took this concept a step further by creating his own Paranoic Critical Method, in which an artist could tap into their subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state. After emerging from a paranoid state, Dalí would create "hand-painted dream photographs" from what he had witnessed, oftentimes culminating in works of vastly unrelated yet realistically painted objects (which were sometimes intensified by techniques of optical illusion). He believed that viewers would find intuitive connection with his work because the subconscious language was universal, and that, "it speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, feeling of death, physical notion of the enigma of space - these vital constants are universally echoed in every human." He would use this method his entire life, most famously seen in paintings such as The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936).

For the next several years, Dalí's paintings were notably illustrative of his theories about the psychological state of paranoia and its importance as subject matter. He painted bodies, bones, and symbolic objects that reflected sexualized fears of father figures and impotence, as well as symbols that referred to the anxiousness over the passing of time. Many of Dalí's most famous paintings are from this highly creative period.

While his career was on the rise, Dalí's personal life was undergoing change. Although he was both inspired and besotted by Gala, his father was less than enthused at this relationship with a woman ten years his son's senior. His early encouragement for his son's artistic development was waning as Dalí moved more toward the avant-garde . The final straw came when Dalí was quoted by a Barcelona newspaper as saying, "sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." The elder Dalí expelled his son from the family home at the end of 1929.

The politics of war were at the forefront of Surrealist debates and in 1934 Breton removed Dalí from the Surrealist group due to their differing views on communism, fascism, and General Franco. Responding to this expulsion Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." For many years Breton, and some members of the Surrealists, would have a tumultuous relationship with Dalí, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him. And yet other artists connected to Surrealism befriended Dalí and continued to be close with him throughout the years.

In the following years, Dalí travelled widely, and practiced more traditional painting styles that drew on his love of canonized painters like Gustave Courbet and Jan Vermeer , though his emotionally charged themes and subject matter remained as strange as ever. His fame had grown so widely that he was in demand by the rich, well known, and fashionable. In 1938, Coco Chanel invited Dalí to her home, "La Pausa," on the French Riviera where he painted extensively, creating work later exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. But undoubtedly, Dalí's true magic moment came that year when he met his hero, Sigmund Freud. After painting his portrait, Dalí was thrilled to learn that Freud had said, "So far, I was led to consider completely insane the Surrealists, who I think I had been adopted as the patron saint. This young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has made me change my mind."

Around this time Dalí also met a major patron, the wealthy British poet Sir Edward James. James not only purchased Dalí's work, but also supported him financially for two years and collaborated on some of Dalí's most famous pieces including The Lobster Phone (1936) and Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) - both of which decorated James' house in Sussex, England.

Dalí and Gala in the US

Dalí had a presence in the United States even before his first visit to the country. The art dealer Julien Levy organized an exhibition of Dalí's work in New York in 1934, that included The Persistence of Memory . The exhibition was incredibly well-received, turning Dalí into a sensation. He first visited the US in the mid-1930s. And he continued to ruffle the waters wherever he went, oftentimes staging deliberate public appearances and interactions, which were in essence early examples of his love for performance. On one such occasion, he and Gala went to a masquerade ball in New York dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. This caused such a scandal that Dalí actually apologized in the press, an action that prompted contempt from the Surrealists in Paris.

Dalí also participated in other Surrealist events while in New York. He was featured in the first exhibition on Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art . He also made quite a scene at a showing of Joseph Cornell's Surrealist films when he knocked over the projector, famously fuming "my idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it."

After the devastation of the Second World War in Europe, Dalí and Gala returned to the United States in 1940. They would remain for eight years, splitting time between New York and California. During this period, Dalí became highly productive, expanding his practice beyond the visual arts into a wide array of other creative interests. He designed jewelry, clothing, furniture, sets for plays and ballets, and even display windows for retail stores. Dalí's eccentric personality often took center stage in many of these pursuits - for example, while being consigned by the department store Bonwit Teller, Dalí was so angered by changes to his artistic vision that he shoved a bathtub through the window display case.

Dalí (and Gala) wanted to become stars and make a large amount of money so Hollywood was a natural destination for the couple. They did not succeed in their quest for cinematic celebrity, but Dalí was asked by the famous director Alfred Hitchcock to create the dream sequence in his thriller Spellbound (1945). In addition, Walt Disney cooperated with Dalí to create the animated cartoon Destino , but the project was suspended due to financial difficulties following World War II and not actually completed until much later (2003).

Return to Port Lligat

After being ousted from the family home in 1929, Dalí purchased a small seaside house in the nearby fishing village of Port Lligat. Eventually he bought up all of the houses around it, transforming his property into a grand villa. Gala and Dalí moved back to Port Lligat in 1948, making it their home base for the next three decades.

Dalí's art continued to evolve. Besides exploring different artistic mediums, Dalí also started using optical illusions, negative space, visual puns, and trompe l'oeil in his work. Starting in 1948 he would make approximately one monumental painting per year - his "Dalí Masterworks" - that were at least five feet long in one or both directions and creatively occupied Dalí for at least a year. His studio had a special slot built into the floor that would allow the huge canvases to be raised and lowered as he worked on them. He painted at least 18 such works between 1948 and 1970.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí's paintings focused primarily on religious themes reflecting his abiding interest in the supernatural. He famously claimed, "I am a carnivorous fish swimming in two waters, the cold water of art and the hot water of science." He aimed to portray space as a subjective reality, which may be why many of his paintings from this period show objects and figures at extremely foreshortened angles. He continued employing his "paranoiac-critical" method, which entailed working long, arduous hours in the studio and expressing his dreams directly on canvas in manic bouts of energy.

Dalí became quite reclusive while encompassed in his studio making paintings. Yet, he continued to step out to orchestrate stunts, or what he called "manifestations" that were just as outrageous as before. Designed to provoke, these performance-based interactions reminded the public that Dalí's inner imp was alive and well. In one, Dalí sipped from a swan's egg as ants emerged from inside its shell; in another he drove around in a car filled to the roof with cauliflower. When his book, The World of Salvador Dalí , was published in 1962 he signed autographed copies at a bookstore in Manhattan while hooked up to a monitor recording his blood pressure and brain waves. Customers left with a signed copy and a printout of Dalí's vitals. He also made a number of commercials for televisions and other media for companies such as Lanvin Chocolates, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff Airlines - casting his star power far and wide.

In the 1960s when Dalí came to New York City, he always stayed at the St. Regis hotel on 5 th Avenue. He made the hotel bar practically his living room, where parties raged throughout his stay. At the time Dalí had an entourage of strange and charismatic characters with whom he spent his time. Andy Warhol , another eccentric collector of outrageously wacky humans, also spent time with Dalí at the St. Regis. In one legendary story, Warhol brought a silkscreen painting as a gift to Dalí, but the older artist threw it on the ground at the hotel and proceeded to pee on it. Rather than get offended, Warhol supposedly loved the whole episode. The group that Warhol later put together at The Factory was considered a modern evocation of the setting Dalí produced earlier.

Late Period and Death

The last two decades of Dalí's life would be the most difficult and psychologically arduous. In 1968 he bought a castle in Pubol for Gala and in 1971 she began staying there for weeks at a time, on her own, forbidding Dalí from visiting without her permission. Her retreats gave Dalí a fear of abandonment and caused him to spiral into depression. Gala inflicted permanent damage on Dalí after it came to light that, in her senility, she had marred his health by dosing him with non-prescribed medication. The physical damage that Gala wrought on Dalí hindered his art-making capacity until his death. After her death in 1982, Dalí experienced a further bout of depression and is believed to have attempted suicide. He also moved into the castle in Pubol, the site of her death.

One of Dalí's most important achievements during this rough time was the creation of The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. Rather than donating a single work to the city, Dalí said, "Where, if not in my own town, should the most extravagant and solid of my work endure, where if not here? The Municipal Theatre, or what remained of it, struck me as very appropriate." In preparation for the museum's opening in 1974 Dalí worked tirelessly to design the building and put together the permanent collection that would serve as his legacy.

On January 23, 1989, Dalí died of heart failure while listening to his favorite record, Tristan and Isolde . He is buried beneath the museum that he built in Figueres. His final resting place is three blocks away from the house that he was born in and across the street from the Sant Pere church where he was baptized and had his first communion.

The Legacy of Salvador Dalí

Dalí epitomized the idea that life is the greatest form of art and he mined his with such relentless passion, purity of mission and diehard commitment to exploring and honing his various interests and crafts that it is impossible to ignore his groundbreaking impact on the art world.

His desire to continually and unapologetically turn the internal to the outside resulted in a body of work that not only evolved the concepts of Surrealism and psychoanalysis on a worldwide visual platform but also modeled permission for people to embrace their selves in all our human glory, warts and all. By showing us visual representations of his dreams and inner world laid bare, through exquisite draftsmanship and master painting techniques, Dalí opened a realm of possibilities for artists looking to inject the personal, the mysterious and the emotional into their work. In post-war New York, these concepts were incorporated and transformed by Abstract Expressionists who used Surrealist techniques of automatism to express the subconscious through art, only now through gesture and color. Dalí's use of wildly juxtaposing found objects to create sculpture helped shake the medium from its more traditional bones, opening the door for great Assemblage artists such as Joseph Cornell. Today, we can still see Dalí's influence on artists painting in Surrealist styles, others in the contemporary visionary arts spheres and all over the digital art and illustration spectrums.

Dalí's physical character in the world, eccentric and enigmatic, paved the way for artists to think of themselves as brands. He showed that there was no separation between Dalí the man and Dalí the work. His use of avant-garde filmmaking, provocative public performance and random, strategic interaction brought his work alive in ways that differed from the painting - instead of the viewer merely looking at a beautiful work that evoked great imagination, they would be "poked" in real life by a manifestation of Dalí's imagination designed to unsettle and conjure reaction. This could later be seen in artists like Yoko Ono . Andy Warhol would go on to concoct his own persona, environment and entourage in much the same way as would countless other 20 th -century artists. In today's social-media landscape, artists are almost expected to be visibly and socially just as interesting as their art work.

Dalí also spearheaded the idea that art, artist and artistic ability could cross many mediums and become a viable commodity. His exhaustive endeavors into fields ranging from fine art to fashion to jewelry to retail and theater design positioned him as a prolific businessman as well as creator. Unlike mass merchandising, which is often disdained in the art world, Dalí's hand touched such a variety of products and places, that literally anyone in the world could own a piece of him. Today this practice is so common that we find great architects like Frank Gehry designing special rings and necklaces for Tiffany or innovators like John Baldessari lending his images to skateboard decks.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Salvador Dalí

• Defining Modern Art Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Dalí's role in it.
• Dalí window displays at Bonwit Teller Dalí exhibited his works at a famous Manhattan department store
• Dalí and The Surrealists - Master Marketers Top 10 marketing stunts by Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dalí.
• The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí By Meredith Etherington-smith
• The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí Our Pick By Ian Gibson
• Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated life by Gala By the Dalí Foundation Gala
• Salvador Dalí: Master of Modern Art (Masterworks) Our Pick By Dr. Julian Beecroft
• The Dali Legacy: How an Eccentric Genius Changed the Art World and Created a Lasting Legacy Our Pick By Dr. Christopher Heath Brown and Dr. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
• Salvador Dali Our Pick By Meryle Secrest
• Dali & His Doctor: The Surreal Friendship Between Salvador Dali and Dr. Edmund Klein By Paul Chimera
• Salvador Dalí (2 volume, Taschen) Our Pick By Robert Descharnes, Gilles Neret
• Salvador Dalí: 1904-1989 (Basic Art) By Catherine Plant, Gilles Neret
• Salvador Dalí: Catalogue Raisonne of Etching and Mixed Media Prints By Salvador Dalí, Lutz W. Loepsinger and Ralf Michler
• Dalí: The Paintings By Robert Descharnes, Gilles Neret
• Dalí (Basic Art) Our Pick By Gilles Néret
• Salvador Dali : The Impossible Collection By Paul Moorhouse
• Salvador Dali: The Making of an Artist Our Pick By Catherine Grenier
• Dali and Disney: Destino: The Story, Artwork, and Friendship Behind the Legendary Film By David A. Bossert
• Dali - Illustrator Our Pick By Eduard Fornes
• Diary of A Genius
• 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship
• The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
• Collected Writing from Salvador Dalí
• Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida
• Salvador Dalí Museum in Spain Our Pick
• The Salvador Dalí Society
• The Enigma of Desire: Salvador Dalí and the conquest of the irrational Our Pick By Zoltán Kováry / PsyArt / June 29, 2009
• Ambiguous figure treatments in the art of Salvador Dali By Gerald H. Fisher / Perception & Psychophysics / 1967
• Marvels of illusion: illusion and perception in the art of Salvador Dali By Susana Martinez-Conde et al. / Frontiers in Human Neuroscience / September 2015
• The Vernacular as Vanguard Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s Our Pick By Sandra Zalman / Journal of Surrealism and the Americas / 2007
• Object-Oriented Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Poetic Autonomy of Things Our Pick By Roger Rothman / Culture, Theory and Critique / 2016
• The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí By Stanley Meiser / Smithsonian Magazine / April 2005
• Salvador Dalí The Enigma of Faith By Jonathan Evens / Artlyst / April 19, 2020
• Unmasking a Surreal Egotist By Alan Riding / The New York Times / September 28, 2004
• NPR segment on Dalí

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist

Spanish painter Salvador Dalí was renowned for his work within the Surrealism movement. Salvador Dalí’s artistic oeuvre includes painting, cinema, sculpting, photography, and design, which he worked on alongside other artists at times. Dreams, the unconscious, sexuality, spirituality, technology, and his innermost personal connections are all major topics in Salvador Dalí’s paintings. To the dismay of all those who appreciated his artwork and the chagrin of his opponents, his volatile and extravagant public behavior often drew more attention than Salvador Dalí’s artwork.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Childhood
• 1.2 Early Training
• 1.3 Mature Period
• 1.4 Salvador Dalí in the United States
• 1.5 The Spanish Artist Returns to Port Lligat
• 1.6 Later Period and Death
• 2.2 Art Style
• 3 Salvador Dalí’s Artworks
• 4.1 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1993) by Salvador Dalí
• 4.2 Diary Of A Genius (2020) by Salvador Dalí
• 5.1 How Did Salvador Dalí Die?
• 5.2 Is There a Salvador Dalí Self-Portrait?
• 5.3 What Was Salvador Dalí Known For?

The Biography of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí’s aspirations to construct a pictorial lexicon competent at representing his visions and dreams are based on Freudian philosophy. These are among the stunning and now universal artworks that helped him attain immense popularity throughout his career and beyond. The obsessional subjects of erotica, mortality, and deterioration pervade the Spanish painter’s oeuvre, demonstrating his knowledge of and assimilation of psychoanalytic concepts of the period.

Salvador Dalí’s artwork contains a lot of ready-made symbolism, ranging from obsessive and animal themes to theological symbols, and also leans on a lot of autobiographical content and memories of childhood.

To better understand Dalí’s immensely complicated and charismatic artworks, these childhood influences, and to answer questions such as “How did Salvador Dalí die?”, let us take an in-depth dive into this Salvador Dalí biography.

The Spanish painter was born to a well-off family in Figueres, a little village outside of Barcelona. His larger-than-life personality developed amid his enthusiasm for art from a young age. He is known to have had chaotic, frenzied, rage-filled tantrums regarding his family and friends.

He found tremendous influence in his early surroundings in Catalonia, and many of its vistas would become recurrent subjects in his later significant pieces.

His parents nurtured his childhood interest in painting. He started sketching instruction when he was ten years of age and attended the Madrid School of Fine Arts in his mid-adolescence, where he dabbled with Pointillist as well as Impressionist techniques. He lost his mother to cancer when he was only 16 years old, which he describes as “the hardest trauma I had ever suffered in my entire life.”

His father presented a solo exhibit of the adolescent creator’s artistically superb charcoal sketches at the family residence when he was 19 years old.

Early Training

Salvador Dalí enlisted at the San Fernando School in Madrid in 1922. He matured there and grew to comfortably embrace his colorful and controversial image. His eccentricities were well-known and were initially more famous than Salvador Dalí’s paintings. He wore his tresses long and was adorned in the fashion of 19th-century English sophisticates, replete with knee-length britches, garnering him the moniker of a dandy.

He toyed with a number of approaches at the time, pursuing whatever piqued his unquenchable curiosity.

He became acquainted with and grew close to a group of prominent cultural figures that also included Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet, and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel. The residence itself was somewhat advanced, exposing Dal to some of the most influential thinkers of the day, including Einstein, Le Corbusier, Calder, and Stravinsky. However, Dalí was dismissed from the institution in 1926 for disrespecting one of his instructors during his last examination before graduating. Dal was out of school for several months after his expulsion.

He then embarked on a life-altering vacation to Paris. He paid a visit to Picasso’s workshop and drew inspiration from the Cubists’ work. He got fascinated by Futurist efforts to replicate movement and present objects from various viewpoints at the same time.

Dalí started researching Freud’s psychoanalytic principles as well as metaphysical artists and Surrealists, and as a result, he started adopting psychoanalytic ways of exploring the subconscious to develop images.

The Spanish artist would spend the next year delving into these ideas while attempting to devise a method of significantly reevaluating reality and modifying perceptions. Apparatus and Hand (1927), his first significant work in this manner, had the symbolic iconography and surreal environment that would become his distinctive painting hallmark.

Mature Period

He then collaborated with Luis Bunuel on An Andalusian Dog , a cinematographic study on horrific cravings and illogical images, in 1928. The subject matter of the video was so graphically and ideologically offensive that he gained instant notoriety, generating quite a sensation among Parisian Surrealists. The Surrealists pondered bringing the Spanish into their fold and dispatched Paul Eluard and his wife Gala, to see him in Cadaques in 1929. This was the first occasion the artist and Gala met, and soon thereafter, the pair initiated a romance, which led to her separation from Eluard.

Gala was Dalí’s longtime, consistent, and most significant muse, his eventual spouse, and also his deepest interest, and professional manager. He traveled to Paris soon after this first encounter and was encouraged to join the Surrealism movement by André Breton. Dalí subscribed to Breton’s automatism thesis , which states that an artist curtails full command over the artistic process by letting the subconsciousness and intuitive voice direct the work.

However, he took this notion a level higher in the early 1930s by developing his own Paranoiac Critical Method, in which an individual may get into their subconscious via systematic illogical reasoning and a self-induced psychotic condition. After waking from a delusional condition, Salvador Dalí would produce “hand-painted fantasy images” of what he had seen, typically resulting in works of wildly unconnected yet accurately painted items that were often heightened by optical illusion methods.

He genuinely believed that audiences would interact with his artwork intuitively because subconscious communication was ubiquitous, and that “it communicates with the lexicon of the great essential constants, associated with sex intuition, the sensation of death, the tangible concept of the oddity of space – these essential components are uniformly reiterated in every human.”

He would utilize this style for the rest of his life, as seen in Salvador Dalí’s paintings such as The Persistence of Memory (1931). Salvador Dalí’s paintings were particularly expressive of his thoughts on the psychological problem of psychosis and its continued importance as a subject matter throughout the next several years.

He depicted corpses, bones, and allegorical items that conveyed sexualized anxieties of male role models and powerlessness, as well as motifs that alluded to worry over the passage of time. Many of Dalí’s most renowned works date from this prolific time.

While Salvador Dalí’s art was flourishing, his personal life was changing. Although he was encouraged and smitten with Gala, his father was less than thrilled with his son’s connection with a lady ten years older than he was. His early backing for his son’s creative growth was eroding as Dalí drifted more toward the avant-garde. The last blow came when the Spanish painter was reported in a Barcelona tabloid as stating, “Sometimes I spat for pleasure on my family’s photo.” Towards the close of 1929, the elder banished his child from the house.

The ethics of war were at the center of Surrealist disputes, and in 1934 Breton excused Dalí from the Surrealist group due to their contrary viewpoints on communists and fascists. In response to his expulsion, Dalí notoriously responded, “I am Surrealism.” For many years, Breton and several Surrealists had a difficult relationship with the Spanish artist, at times respecting him and at others distancing themselves from him.

Other Surrealist artists embraced him and remained close to him all through the years. In the years afterward, Salvador Dalí has traveled extensively and mastered more classical painting approaches inspired by canonized artists such as Jan Vermeer and Gustave Courbet, while his emotionally loaded subjects and subject matter have remained as unusual as ever.

His great reputation had spread so far that he was in high demand among the wealthy, well-known, and trendy. But Salvador Dalí’s actual magical moment certainly occurred that year when he met his idol, Sigmund Freud.

He was overjoyed to find, after painting his image, that Sigmund Freud had declared, “So far, I had been led to believe that the Surrealists, whom I had taken as my patron saint, were utterly mad. This young Spanish painter, with his frank, obsessive eyes and clear technical prowess, has persuaded me to reconsider.” He also met an important sponsor at this period, the rich British poet Sir Edward James. James not only bought Salvador Dalí’s art but also financially backed him for a couple of years and cooperated on several of Dalí’s most renowned pieces, such as The Lobster Phone (1936)

Salvador Dalí in the United States

The Spanish painter already had a foothold in the United States before his first visit. In 1934, the art dealer Julien Levy staged a show of Salvador Dalí’s paintings in New York, which featured The Persistence of Memory . Dal became a phenomenon when the exhibit was well-received. He initially visited the United States in the mid-1930s. And he kept ruffling feathers wherever he went, frequently arranging planned public appearances and exchanges that were early instances of his affinity for performing.

At one of these events, the pair costumed as the Lindbergh baby and his abductor and attended a masquerade event in New York. This produced such a commotion that he apologized in the newspaper, earning him scorn from the Parisian Surrealists.

While in New York, the artist also attended other Surrealist gatherings. He was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural exhibition on Dada, Fantastic Art, and Surrealism.

He also caused quite a stir when he toppled over the projector during a screening of Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist films, famously seething “My film concept is exactly that, and I was planning to pitch it to somebody who would want to have it produced. I never took notes or told anybody about it, but it’s as if he took it.” Dali and his wife returned to America in 1940, following the destruction of the Second World War in Europe. During this time, he became extremely productive, broadening his profession beyond the visual arts to include a wide range of other creative pursuits.

He created jewelry, apparel, furniture, settings for plays and ballets, and even retail shop display windows. The Spanish painter’s quirky nature frequently took the spotlight in many of these endeavors; for example, when being assigned by the department shop Bonwit Teller, the artist was so enraged by alterations to his design that he slammed a bathtub through the front display case. They wanted to be famous and make a lot of money, so Hollywood was a logical choice for the pair.

They were not successful in their pursuit for movie stardom, but he was asked to create the design for the dream sequence in the film, “Spellbound” (1945), by Alfred Hitchcock. Furthermore, Disney collaborated with Dalí to make the cartoon “Destino”, but the production was halted due to financial issues after the war and was not realized until long later.

The Spanish Artist Returns to Port Lligat

The artist then bought a tiny coastal property in the neighboring fishing hamlet of Port Lligat after being evicted from the family home in 1929. He later purchased all of the surrounding properties, developing his land into a large palace. The couple returned to Port Lligat in 1948, making it their permanent residence for the following 30 years. Salvador Dalí’s artwork evolved throughout time. In addition to experimenting with various creative materials, Dal began to use optical illusions, negative space, graphic puns, and trompe l’oeil in his work.

Beginning in 1948, he would create one huge painting every year – his “masterworks” – that artistically engaged the Spanish artist for at least a year. His workshop included a unique opening in the floor that allowed him to lift and lower the massive canvases while he worked on them. Between 1948 and 1970, he created at least 18 similar pieces. He experimented with photography, as he did with many other artistic endeavors at the period.

Here, he collaborated with Philippe Halsman to make the renowned shot, Dal Atomicus (1948). Salvador Dalí’s paintings throughout the 1940s and 1950s were predominantly religious in nature, reflecting his lifelong fascination with the occult. “I am a predatory fish moving in two waters, the frigid water of art and the boiling water of science,” he famously declared. He intended to depict space as a subjective reality, which may explain why many of his artworks from this period depict objects and individuals at highly foreshortened angles.

He stuck to his “paranoiac-critical” style of spending long, difficult hours in the workshop and articulating his fantasies straight on canvas in frenzied bursts of intensity. The artist became rather solitary while working in his studio on paintings. Nonetheless, he continued to come out to stage stunts, or “manifestations,” that were as absurd as before.

These provocative performance-based exchanges informed the audience that the Spanish painter’s inner rascal was still alive and strong.

He drank from a swan’s egg while ants erupted from its shell in one, and drove about in a car stuffed to the brim with cauliflower in another. In 1962, following the release of his book The World of Salvador Dalí , he autographed personalized copies while linked up to a device that recorded his heart rate and electrical impulses in a Manhattan book shop. Buyers were given a signed hard copy of his book as well as a printout of his vital signs.

Later Period and Death

The latter two decades of the artist’s life would be the most stressful and mentally taxing. He bought a mansion in Pubol for Gala in 1968, and then in 1971, she began traveling there by herself for many days or even several weeks at a stretch, prohibiting him from arriving without her permission. Because he was frightened of being deserted, he grew depressed as a consequence of her absence.

Gala irreversibly injured the Spanish painter after it was found that she had endangered his condition in her mental decline by administering non-prescribed medications.

His physical injuries from Gala hampered his ability to create art till his death. Salvador Dalí suffered from depression again after her death in 1982 and is thought to have attempted suicide. During this difficult period, one of Dalí’s most significant accomplishments was the establishment of The Salvador Dalí Museum in Figueres. Dal said that rather than dedicating a single piece to the city, “Where else but in my own town could the most expensive and substantial of my artwork exist, where else but here?”

The artist worked diligently in the run-up to the museum’s opening in 1974, designing the structure and assembling the collection that would function as his legacy. The Spanish painter died of heart failure on the 23rd of January, 1989. He was laid to rest beneath the museum he founded in Figueres.

Salvador Dalí’s Art Style and Legacy

The Spanish painter exemplified the concept that life is the finest kind of art, and he mined it with such unrelenting passion, purity of goal, and dogged devotion to discovering and polishing his different hobbies and skills that his unprecedented effect on the art world is impossible to deny.

His drive to turn internal to the exterior unabashedly produced a body of work that not only expanded the principles of Surrealism and psychoanalysis on a global visual platform but also demonstrated freedom for people to accept themselves in all our human beauty, with all our imperfections.

He opened up a world of options for artists trying to integrate the personal, enigmatic, and emotive into their works by offering us visual depictions of his visions and the inner world left bare, via fine draftsmanship and masterful painting methods. These ideas were integrated and changed by Abstract Expressionists in postwar New York, who employed Surrealist tactics of automatism to convey the subconscious via art, only now using motion and color.

Dalí’s use of dramatically juxtaposed found elements in sculpture helped loosen the discipline from its more conventional bones, paving the way for renowned Assemblage creators like Joseph Cornell. His impact may still be seen today in artists painting in Surrealist techniques, others in modern visual arts circles, and all throughout the digital arts and animation spectrums.

His unconventional and enigmatic physical presence in the world created the door for artists to conceive of themselves as trademarks. He demonstrated that there was no major distinction between the man and the artist. His utilization of avant-garde movie-making, controversial live performance, and arbitrary, strategic interplay brought his artwork to life in many ways that painting did not: instead of the audience simply looking at a brilliant work that conjured up great curiosity, they would be “jabbed” in real life by an incarnation of the artist’s dreams intended to unnerve and elicit a reaction.

This was later found in artists such as Yoko Ono. Andy Warhol would go on to create his own character, atmosphere, and crew, much like numerous other 20th-century artists. Artists are practically expected to be as visible and socially intriguing as their artistic work in the current media milieu.

Dalí’s also pioneered the notion that art, artists, and creative aptitude might transcend several mediums and become valuable commodities. His extensive ventures into disciplines spanning from fine art to clothing to jewelry to commerce and theatrical design established him as a successful businessman as well as an artist.

Unlike mass commercialization, which is typically derided in the art world, his hand touched so many different objects and locations that anybody around the globe might possess a piece of him. Today, famous architects such as Frank Gehry make unique rings and necklaces for Tiffany, while innovators such as John Baldessari donate his graphics to skateboards. He believed in Surrealist André Breton’s notion of automatism, but finally chose his own self-created technique of reaching the unconscious known as “paranoiac-critical,” a condition in which one might imitate hallucination while remaining sane.

This method, which the artist ironically described as “irrational knowledge,” was taken by his peers, mostly Surrealists, to a range of disciplines ranging from cinema to literature to fashion. Much of Salvador Dalí’s artwork is rooted in the great tradition of art, and the artist has always freely recognized his obligation to painters like Johannes Vermeer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Diego Velazquez.

His method is classic. His surface style is reminiscent of van Eyck’s Flemish paintings and the works of the Dutch minor painters of the 17th century. He has created a still life in the style of his renowned compatriot, Zurbaran. His drawings frequently have Renaissance characteristics. His surreal compositions have been compared to those of Hieronymus Bosch , and he has incorporated mythical and religious subjects that are centuries old.

“Hidden shapes” appear frequently throughout painting history. There is no doubt that he is one of the most well-known and well-liked painters of the 20th century; nonetheless, there is a lot of controversy around him and his work.

Many detractors of the artist argue that after his brief period as a surrealist, he made very little, if any, works that contributed to the art world and to his overall career. Many, on the other hand, like and respect his works and aspirations. In fact, more than one museum, such as the Salvador Dalí Museum dedicated to the artist has opened, displaying many of the works that he gave to the art world throughout his lifetime.

Despite engaging in a meaningful engagement with the history of international art throughout his life – ranging from Renaissance artists such as da Vinci to Cubist Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst – Dalí’s dreams remained bravely in this region. Much that appears essential to us today may lose its relevance in the future when Salvador Dalí’s paintings are placed in appropriate context alongside the work of artists from all times.

He will always be remembered as one of the few 20th century artists who mix deep regard for the past with very current sensibilities. People will always be drawn to his work because of his incredibly personal and constantly unexpected imagination, which is the source of his brilliance.

Salvador Dalí’s Artworks

Although paintings were the bulk of Salvador Dali’s artwork, he also made sculptures, jewelry designs, illustrations for numerous publications and book series, and a sequence of pieces for several theaters and performances that were presented in theaters.

His life and work had a significant impact on contemporary art , other artists within the Surrealism movement, and modern artists.

• Great Masturbator (1929)
• The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• The Enigma of William Tell (1933)
• Lobster Telephone (1936)
• Crucifixion (1954)

Recommended Reading

What did you think of our Salvador Dalí Biography? There is so much to cover, maybe we missed something. Luckily there are in-depth books available that will help you understand Salvador Dalí’s paintings and life even better. Here is a list of books all related to Salvador Dalí’s art and lifetime.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1993) by Salvador Dalí

He was one of the most vibrant and divisive individuals in 20th-century art. He was a Surrealist trailblazer who was both lauded and loathed for the subconscious images he transmitted into his canvases, which he referred to as “hand-painted dreamed images.” This initial autobiography, which spans his 20s and 30s, is as surprising and enigmatic as his work. It is lavishly adorned with more than 80 images of the artist and his creations, as well as hundreds of his works. Here are interesting glimpses of the talented, ambitious, and ruthlessly self-promoter artist who constructed theater sets, store interiors, and jewelry as easily as he created surrealistic paintings .

• Must-read for anyone interested in 20th century art and its artists
• Superbly illustrated with over 80 photographs of Dalí and his works
• Includes scores of Dalí drawings and sketches

Diary Of A Genius (2020) by Salvador Dalí

This book is considered a foundational text of Surrealism, showing the most amazing and personal machinations of his mind, the unconventional polymath prodigy who has become the true personification of the 20th century’s most highly subversive, frightening, and powerful art movement . This is the mind that can imagine and produce scenes of tranquil Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmare scenes of soft watches, flaming giraffes, and fly-covered corpses the next. This book is required reading for anybody interested in 20th-century art and one of its most brilliant and captivating individuals.

• Includes a brilliant and revelatory essay on Salvador Dalí
• Illustrated throughout with over 60 works by the artist
• One of the seminal texts of Surrealism

Salvador Dalí made his debut in the art world in 1929 and remained in the public light until his passing almost 60 years later. His most significant conceptual addition to Surrealism was his early 1930s formulation of a process to organize confusion and thus promote a thorough undermining of reality. The approach described a purposefully bewildered state of mind that allowed a person to link seemingly unconnected events, opening up new pathways of thinking and production. A few well-known Salvador Dalí quotes include: “Don’t bother trying to be contemporary. Regrettably, it is the one thing that you cannot escape no matter what”, and “I adore educated foes as much as I despise ignorant ones who promote me.”

Frequently Asked Questions

How did salvador dalí die.

He died from a heart attack. He was busy listening to Tristan and Isolde , his most favored record, when he passed. He passed on the 23rd of January in 1989.

Is There a Salvador Dalí Self-Portrait?

There are in fact several Salvador Dalí self-portraits. He was famed for being arrogant and self-centered, yet this would emerge to be crucial to his success. His self-portraits teach us more about how he saw himself, and he had a complicated relationship with himself. He worked in a lot of different art forms outside surrealism, and as a result, we have been given his picture in a variety of ways, including the cubist item on this page. He also worked in impressionism when he was younger, although certainly not in portraiture.

What Was Salvador Dalí Known For?

Dalí was interested in the art style known as surrealism. This was an art style in which painters created dream-like images and depicted circumstances that would be strange or inconceivable to encounter in everyday life. Salvador Dalí created sculptures, paintings, and films based on his visions. He created melted clocks and floating eyeballs, as well as clouds that resemble facial features and rocks that resemble bodies.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist.” Art in Context. April 6, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/

Meyer, I. (2022, 6 April). Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/

Meyer, Isabella. “Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist.” Art in Context , April 6, 2022. https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

A Smithsonian magazine special report

ARTS & CULTURE

The surreal world of salvador dalí.

Genius or madman? A new exhibition may help you decide

Stanley Meisler

Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy, and early in his career exhibited a drawing, titled Sacred Heart , that featured the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.” Publicity and money apparently mattered so much to Dalí that, twitching his waxed, upturned mustache, he endorsed a host of products for French and American television commercials. Diffidence was not in his vocabulary. “Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing,” he said in 1960, “but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time.”

Dalí’s antics, however, often obscured the genius. And many art critics believe that he peaked artistically in his 20s and 30s, then gave himself over to exhibitionism and greed. (He died in 1989 at age 84.) Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian a year ago, critic Robert Hughes dismissed Dalí’s later works as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale.” When Dawn Ades of England’s University of Essex, a leading Dalí scholar, began specializing in his work 30 years ago, her colleagues were aghast. “They thought I was wasting my time,” she says. “He had a reputation that was hard to salvage. I have had to work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.”

Now Americans will have a fresh opportunity to make up their own minds. An exhibition of more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings, the largest assemblage of the artist’s work ever, is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15. The retrospective, which comes from the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, marks the climax of a worldwide celebration of Dalí that began in Spain last year on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Titled “Salvador Dalí,” the show, sponsored in Philadelphia by the financial services company Advanta, plays down the exhibitionism. Visitors can thus assess the work without being assaulted by Dalí the clown. But while that makes good artistic sense, it neglects a vital aspect of the artist. After all, Dalí without the antics is not Dalí.

That is addressed in a second exhibition, “Dalí and Mass Culture,” which originated in Barcelona last year, moved on to Madrid and to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and concludes its tour at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (March 5 to June 12). In addition to his paintings, the “Mass Culture” show features Dalí film projects, magazine covers, jewelry, furniture and photographs of his outlandish “Dream of Venus” pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech was born May 11, 1904, in the Catalonian town of Figueres in northeastern Spain. His authoritarian father, Salvador Dalí Cusí, was a well-paid official with the authority to draw up legal documents. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferres, came from a family that designed and sold decorated fans, boxes and other art objects. Although she stopped working in the family business after marriage, she would amuse her young son by molding wax figurines out of colored candles, and she encouraged his creativity. According to Dalí biographer Ian Gibson, she was proud of Salvador’s childhood drawings. “When he says he’ll draw a swan,” she would boast, “he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.”

Dalí had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died just nine months before the future artist’s birth. A sister, Ana María, was born four years later. Dreamy, imaginative, spoiled and self-centered, the young Salvador was used to getting his own way. “At the age of six,” he wrote in his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , “I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” He prided himself on being different and felt himself blessed with a delicate sensitivity. Grasshoppers frightened him so much that other children threw them at him to delight in his terror.

Dalí was 16 when his mother died of cancer. “This was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I worshiped her. . . . I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name!” Yet eight years after her death, he would sketch the outline of Christ in an ink drawing and scrawl across it the words about spitting on his mother’s portrait. (Although Dalí probably intended the work as an anticlerical statement, not a personal slur against his mother, news of it infuriated his father, who threw him out of the house.)

The precocious Dalí was just 14 when his works were first exhibited, as part of a show in Figueres. Three years later, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid but, once there, felt there was more to learn about the latest currents in Paris from French art magazines than from his teachers, whom he believed were out of touch. (On a brief excursion to Paris with his father in 1926, he called on his idol, Pablo Picasso. “I have come to see you before visiting the Louvre,” Dalí said. “You’re quite right,” Picasso replied.) When it came time for his year-end oral exam in art history at the academy, Dalí balked at the trio of examiners. “I am very sorry,” he declared, “but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well.” Academy officials expelled him without a diploma.

It was probably inevitable that the then-current ideas of the French Surrealists—artists such as Jean Arp, René Magritte and Max Ernst—would attract Dalí. They were trying to apply the new, psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dalí was well acquainted with Freud and his ideas about sexual repression taking the form of dreams and delusions, and he was fascinated with the Surrealists’ attempts to capture these dreams in paint.

It was Spanish artist Joan Miró, a fellow Catalan allied to the Surrealists, who would bring Dalí to their attention. Miró even had his own Paris dealer look at Dalí’s paintings on a visit to Figueres. Afterward, Dalí wrote to his friend the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca, whom he had met during their student days in Madrid, that Miró “thinks that I’m much better than all the young painters in Paris put together, and he’s written to me telling me that I’ve got everything set up for me there in order to make a great hit.” Miró continued to drum up interest in Dalí’s work in Paris, and when the artist arrived there in 1929, Miró introduced him to many of the Surrealists.

Dalí had come to Paris to take part in the filming of Un Chien Andalou ( An Andalusian Dog ), which Spanish film directorLuis Buñuel, whom Dalí had also known since his studentdays, was directing from a script on which he and Dalíhad collaborated. The 17-minute film, as incoherent as adream, riveted—and appalled—audiences with its overt sexualand graphic imagery. Even today, it’s hard not to cringe atimages of a man wielding a razor against the eye of a woman, priests towing dead donkeys, and ants devouring a rottinghand. Dalí boasted that the movie, which was praised byavant-garde critics, “plunged like a dagger into the heart of Paris.”

In the summer of that same year, Dalí, 25, met his future wife and lifelong companion, Gala, at his family’s vacation home in Cadaqués, a picturesque fishing village on the craggy Mediterranean coast, 20 miles from Figueres. Among the visitors that summer were Buñuel, Magritte and French poet Paul Éluard and his Russian-born wife, Helena Diakanoff Devulina, better known as Gala. Ten years older than Dalí, Gala was at first put off by Dalí’s showoff manner, heavily pomaded hair and air of dandyism that included a necklace of imitation pearls. His demeanor struck her as “professional Argentine tango slickness.” But the two were ultimately drawn to each other, and when Gala’s husband and the others left Cadaqués, she stayed behind with Dalí.

The affair proceeded slowly. It was not until the next year, according to Dalí, that in a hotel in the south of France, he “consummated love with the same speculative fanaticism that I put into my work.” Dalí’s father was so upset by the liaison and by Dalí’s eccentric behavior that he branded him “a perverted son on whom you cannot depend for anything” and permanently banished him from the family homes. Critic Robert Hughes described Gala in his Guardian article as a “very nasty and very extravagant harpy.” But Dalí was completely dependent on her. (The couple would marry in 1934.) “Without Gala,” he once claimed, “Divine Dalí would be insane.”

International acclaim for Dalí’s art came not long after he met Gala. In 1933, he enjoyed solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City and became, as Dawn Ades, who curated the exhibition in Venice, puts it, “Surrealism’s most exotic and prominent figure.” French poet and critic André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, wrote that Dalí’s name was “synonymous with revelation in the most resplendent sense of the word.” In 1936, Dalí, at 32, made the cover of Time magazine.

In addition to Freudian imagery—staircases, keys, dripping candles—he also used a host of his own symbols, which had special, usually sexual, significance to him alone: the grasshoppers that once tormented him, ants, crutches, and a William Tell who approaches his son not with a bow and arrow but a pair of scissors. When Dalí finally met Freud in London in 1938 and started to sketch him, the 82-year-old psychoanalyst whispered to others in the room, “That boy looks like a fanatic.” The remark, repeated to Dalí, delighted him.

Dalí’s Surrealist paintings are surely his finest work—even though his penchant for excess often led him to paint too many shocking images on a single canvas and too many canvases that seem to repeat themselves. But at his best, Dalí, a superb draftsman, could be spare and orderly. The Persistence of Memory , for example, features three “melting” watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches saddles a strange biomorphic form that looks like some kind of mollusk but is meant to be the deflated head of Dalí. When New York dealer Julien Levy bought the painting for $250 in 1931, he called it “10 x 14 inches of Dalí dynamite.” The work, which was acquired by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1934, excited viewers even as it puzzled them. One critic urged readers to “page Dr. Freud” to uncover the meaning in the canvas.

As his fame grew, Dalí’s reputation was undermined by his outrageous pronouncements. He confessed that he dreamed of Adolph Hitler “as a woman” whose flesh “ravished me.” Although he insisted he rejected Hitlerism despite such fantasies, the Surrealists, who were allied to the French Communist Party, expelled him in 1939. He also later extolled Spain’s fascist leader Gen. Francisco Franco for establishing “clarity, truth and order” in Spain.Yet just before the civil war began, Dalí painted Soft Construction with Boiled Beans ( Premonition of Civil War ), in which a tormented figure, straight out of the works of Francisco Goya, tears itself apart in what Dalí called “a delirium of autostrangulation.” The work is a powerful antiwar statement.

Dalí and Gala visited the United States often in the late 1930s and made it their home during World War II. The American sojourn ushered in the era of Dalí’s greatest notoriety. “Every morning upon awakening,” he wrote in 1953, “I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”

Dalí admitted having a “pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.” He felt impelled, he said, to accumulate millions of dollars. So he created jewelry, designed clothes and furniture (including a sofa in the form of actress Mae West’s lips), painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Spellbound and designed displays for store windows. He took these commissions seriously. In 1939, he was so enraged when his Bonwit Teller window display in Manhattan was changed that he shoved a bathtub in it so hard that both he and the tub crashed through the window.

In 1948 Dalí and Gala moved back to their house (which Dalí had festooned with sculptures of eggs) in Port Lligat, Spain, a couple of miles along the Mediterranean coast from Cadaqués. Dalí was 44; for the next 30 years, he would paint most of the year in Port Lligat and, with Gala, divide his winters between the Hotel Meurice in Paris and the St.RegisHotel in New York City.

World War II changed Dalí’s ideas about painting. As he had once been in thrall to Freud, he now became obsessed with the splitting of the atom and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg, leader of the German scientists who failed to develop an atomic bomb. “Dalí was acutely aware of his times,” says the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Michael R.Taylor, who curated the show in Philadelphia. “He said to himself: Velázquez and Raphael—if they had lived in a nuclear age, what would they paint?”

In 1951, Dalí painted a delicate, Raphaelite head, then let it burst apart into countless pieces, swirling like cascading atoms ( Raphaelesque Head Exploding ). In a Surrealist touch, the flying particles are tiny rhinoceros horns, which Dalí regarded as symbols of chastity. Dalí dubbed his new style Nuclear Mysticism.

His work during these years was often self-indulgent. He posed Gala too many times, for instance, as an unlikely Virgin Mary and painted enormous canvases with historical and religious scenes that look overblown today. Yet this new religious imagery often pulsed with power.

His stunts, too, were self-indulgent, though some were quite funny. In 1955 he showed up for a lecture in Paris in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflower. To promote The World of Salvador Dalí , a book he produced with French photographer Robert Descharnes in 1962, Dalí dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed in a Manhattan bookstore. Attended by a doctor, a nurse and Gala, he signed books while wired to a machine that recorded his brain waves and blood pressure. A copy of this data was then presented to the purchaser.

For a television commercial in 1967, he sat in an airplane alongside Whitey Ford, the New York Yankees star pitcher, and proclaimed the advertising campaign slogan of Braniff Airlines in heavily accented English—“If you got it, flaunt it.” Said Ford, “That’s telling ’em, Dalí baby.”

He flaunted it all right. In 1965 he began selling signed sheets of otherwise blank lithograph paper for $10 a sheet. He may have signed well over 50,000 in the remaining quarter century of his life, an action that resulted in a flood of Dalí lithograph forgeries.

But while Dalí could play the buffoon, he was also generous in reaching out to young artists and critics. When American Pop Art painter James Rosenquist was a struggling artist painting billboards in New York City, Dalí invited him to lunch at the St. Regis, then spent hours discussing art and encouraging his young guest. As a graduate student in the late 1960s, Dawn Ades knocked unannounced on Dalí’s door at Port Lligat. He invited her in. “Please sit down and watch me paint,” he said, then answered her questions as he worked.

And Dalí’s public popularity never waned. In 1974, when he was 70 years old, the town of Figueres opened the Dalí Theatre-Museum with an array of works donated by its renowned native son. The building was more of a Surrealist happening than a museum, featuring bizarre Dalí favorites such as the long black Cadillac that rained inside itself whenever a visitor dropped a coin into a slot. Hundreds of thousands of visitors still tour the museum each year.

Dalí’s last years were not joyful. He had bought a castle as a retreat for Gala in the town of Púbol, and beginning in 1971, she stayed there for weeks at a time. Dalí decorated parts of the castle with ostentatious furniture, but by his own account was allowed to visit only by written invitation. His fear that Gala might abandon him almost certainly contributed to his depression and decline in health.

After Gala’s death in 1982 at the age of 87, Dalí’s depression worsened, and he moved into the Púbol castle attended by nurses. His incessant use of a call button caused a short circuit that set off a fire in his bed and burned his leg. Doctors transferred him to Figueres, where he lay bedridden in the Torre Galatea, an old building with a tower that had been purchased after Gala’s death as an extension to the museum. “He does not want to walk, to speak, to eat,” the French photographer Descharnes, then managing Dalí’s affairs, told a newspaper reporter in 1986. “If he wants, he can draw, but he does not want.”

Dalí died in the Torre Galatea on January 23, 1989, at age 84 and was buried in the Dalí Theatre-Museum. For the most part, posthumous critical judgment has been harsh. “Critics believed that everything he painted after 1939 was awful junk,” says the Philadelphia Museum’s Taylor. “But I don’t agree. There were masterpieces in his later work, perhaps not as good as the early masterpieces, but masterpieces nevertheless. Dalí should be ranked with Picasso and Matisse as one of the three greatest painters of the 20th century, and I hope our exhibition will make this clear.”

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Stanley Meisler | READ MORE

Salvador Dalí

Prints and Drawings Rooms

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), known as Salvador Dalí ( DAH -lee, dah- LEE , Catalan: [səlβəˈðo ðəˈli] , Spanish: [salβaˈðoɾ ðaˈli] ), was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Dalí received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory , was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings. Dalí lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) before leaving for the United States in 1940 where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948 where he announced his return to the Catholic faith and developed his "nuclear mysticism" style, based on his interest in classicism, mysticism, and recent scientific developments.

Dalí's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design and photography, at times in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays and criticism. Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork. His public support for the Francoist regime, his commercial activities and the quality and authenticity of some of his late works have also been controversial. His life and work were an important influence on other Surrealists, pop art and contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

There are two major museums devoted to Salvador Dalí's work: the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.

This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License . Spotted a problem? Let us know .

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Biography of Salvador Dalí, Surrealist Artist

A Life as Strange as His Paintings

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• Doctor of Arts, University of Albany, SUNY
• M.S., Literacy Education, University of Albany, SUNY
• B.A., English, Virginia Commonwealth University

Spanish Catalan artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) became known for his surreal creations and his flamboyant life. Innovative and prolific, Dalí produced paintings, sculpture, fashion, advertisements, books, and film. His outlandish, upturned mustache and bizarre antics made Dalí a cultural icon. Although shunned by members of the surrealism movement , Salvador Dalí ranks among the world's most famous surrealist artists.

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain on May 11, 1904. Named Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol, the child lived in the shadow of another son, also named Salvador. The dead brother "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute," Dalí wrote in his autobiography, "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí." Dalí believed that he was his brother, reincarnated. Images of the brother often appeared in Dalí’s paintings.

Dalí’s autobiography may have been fanciful, but his stories suggest a strange, haunted childhood filled with rage and disturbing behaviors. He claimed that he bit the head off a bat when he was five and that he was drawn to — but cured of — necrophilia.

Dalí lost his mother to breast cancer when he was 16. He wrote, “I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul."

Dalí’s middle-class parents encouraged his creativity. His mother had been a designer of decorative fans and boxes. She entertained the child with creative activities such as molding figurines out of candles. Dalí’s father, an attorney, was strict and believed in harsh punishments. However, he provided learning opportunities and arranged a private exhibition of Dalí’s drawings in their home.

When Dalí was still in his teens, he held his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres. In 1922, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. During this time, he dressed as a dandy and developed the flamboyant mannerisms that brought him fame in later life. Dalí also met progressive thinkers such as filmmaker Luis Buñuel,  poet Federico García Lorca, architect Le Corbusier , scientist Albert Einstein , and composer Igor Stravinsky.

Dalí's formal education ended abruptly in 1926. Faced with an oral exam in art history, he announced, "I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them." Dalí was promptly expelled.

Dalí's father had supported the young man's creative efforts, but he could not tolerate his son's disregard for social norms. Discord escalated in 1929 when the deliberately provocative Dalí exhibited " The Sacred Heart ," an ink drawing that contained the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother." His father saw this quote in a Barcelona newspaper and expelled Dalí from the family home.

Still in his mid-20s, Dalí met and fell in love with Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova, wife of the surrealistic writer Paul Éluard. Diakonova, also known as Gala, left Éluard for Dalí. The couple married in a civil ceremony in 1934 and renewed their vows in a Catholic ceremony in 1958. Gala was ten years older than Dalí. She handled his contracts and other business affairs and served as his muse and life-long companion.

Dalí had flings with younger women and erotic attachments to men. Nevertheless, he painted romanticized, mystical portraits of Gala. Gala, in turn, appeared to accept Dalí's infidelities.

In 1971, after they'd been married for nearly 40 years, Gala withdrew for weeks at a time, staying in an 11th century Gothic castle Dalí bought for her in Púbol, Spain . Dalí was permitted to visit only by invitation.

Suffering dementia, Gala began to give Dalí a non-prescription medication that damaged his nervous system and caused tremors that effectively ended his work as a painter. In 1982, she died at age 87 and was buried at the Púbol castle. Deeply depressed, Dalí lived there for the remaining seven years of his life.

Dalí and Gala never had children. Long after their deaths, a woman born in 1956 said that she was Dalí's biological daughter with legal rights to part of his estate. In 2017, Dalí's body (with mustache still intact) was exhumed. Samples were taken from his teeth and hair. DNA tests refuted the woman's claim .

As a young student, Salvador Dalí painted in many styles, from traditional realism to cubism . The surrealistic style he became famous for emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

After leaving the academy, Dalí made several trips to Paris and met Joan Miró , René Magritte , Pablo Picasso , and other artists who experimented with symbolic imagery. Dalí also read Sigmund Freud 's psychoanalytic theories and began to paint images from his dreams. In 1927, Dalí completed " Apparatus and Hand , which is considered his first major work in the surrealistic style.

A year later, Dalí worked with Luis Buñuel on the 16-minute silent film, "Un Chien Andalou" (An Andalusian Dog) . The Parisian surrealists expressed astonishment over the film's sexual and political imagery.  André Breton , poet and founder of the surrealism movement, invited Dalí to join their ranks.

Inspired by Breton's theories, Dalí explored ways to use his unconscious mind to tap into his creativity. He developed a "Paranoic Creative Method" in which he induced a paranoid state and painted "dream photographs." Dalí's most famous paintings, including "The Persistence of Memory" (1931) and " Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) " (1936), used this method.

As his reputation grew, so did the upturned mustache that became Salvador Dalí's trademark.

Salvador Dalí and Adolf Hitler

In the years leading to World War II, Dalí feuded with André Breton and clashed with members of the surrealist movement. Unlike Luis Buñuel, Picasso, and Miró, Salvador Dalí did not publicly denounce the rise of fascism in Europe.

Dalí claimed that he did not associate with Nazi beliefs, and yet he wrote that "Hitler turned me on in the highest." His indifference to politics and his provocative sexual behaviors stirred outrage. In 1934, his fellow surrealists held a "trial" and officially expelled Dalí from their group.

Dalí declared, "I myself am surrealism," and continued to pursue antics designed to attract attention and sell art.

" The Enigma of Hitler ," which Dalí completed in 1939, expresses the dark mood of the era and suggests a preoccupation with the rising dictator. Psychoanalysts have offered various interpretations of the symbols Dalí used. Dalí himself remained ambiguous.

Declining to take a stand on world events, Dalí famously said, "Picasso is a communist. Neither am I."

Dalí in the USA

Expelled by the European surrealists, Dalí and his wife Gala traveled to the United States, where their publicity stunts found a ready audience. When invited to design a pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, Dalí proposed "genuine explosive giraffes." The giraffes were nixed, but Dalí's “Dream of Venus” pavilion did include bare-breasted models and an enormous image of a naked woman posing as Botticelli’s Venus .

Dalí’s “Dream of Venus” pavilion represented surrealism and Dada art at its most outrageous. By combining images from revered Renaissance art with crude sexual and animal images, the pavilion challenged convention and mocked the established art world.

Dalí and Gala lived in the United States for eight years, stirring scandals on both coasts. Dalí's work appeared in major exhibitions, including the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also designed dresses, ties, jewelry, stage sets, store window displays, magazine covers, and advertising images. In Hollywood, Dalí created the creepy dream scene for Hitchcock's 1945 psychoanalytic thriller,  " Spellbound."

Later Years

Dalí and Gala returned to Spain in 1948. They lived at Dalí's studio home in Port Lligat in Catalonia, traveling to New York or Paris in the winter.

For the next thirty years, Dalí experimented with a variety of mediums and techniques. He painted mystical crucifixion scenes with images of his wife, Gala, as the Madonna. He also explored optical illusions, trompe l'oeil , and holograms.

Rising young artists like Andy Warhol (1928-1987) praised Dalí. They said that his use of photographic effects foretold the Pop Art movement. Dalí's paintings " The Sistine Madonna " (1958) and " Portrait of My Dead Brother " (1963) look like enlarged photographs with seemingly abstract arrays of shaded dots. The images take form when viewed from a distance.

However, many critics and fellow artists dismissed Dalí's later work. They said that he squandered his mature years on kitschy, repetitive, and commercial projects. Salvador Dalí was widely viewed as a popular culture personality rather than a serious artist.

Renewed appreciation for Dalí's art surfaced during the centennial of his birth in 2004. An exhibition titled “Dalí and Mass Culture” toured major cities in Europe and the United States. Dalí's endless showmanship and his work in film, fashion design, and commercial art were presented in the context of an eccentric genius reinterpreting the modern world.

Dalí Theatre and Museum

Salvador Dalí died of heart failure on January 23, 1989. He is buried in a crypt below the stage of the Dalí Theatre-Museum (Teatro-Museo Dalí) in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. The building, which is based on a Dalí design, was constructed on the site of the Municipal Theatre where he exhibited as a teenager. 

The Dalí Theatre-Museum contains works that span the artist's career and includes items that Dalí created especially for the space. The building itself is a masterpiece, said to be the world's largest example of surrealist architecture.

Visitors to Spain can also tour the Gala-Dalí Castle of Púbol and Dalí's studio home in Portlligat, two of many painterly places around the world.

• Dalí, Salvador. Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí . Edited by Parinaud André, Solar, 2009.
• Dalí, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier, Dover Publications; Reprint edition, 1993.
• Jones, Jonathan. "Dalí's enigma, Picasso's protest: the most important artworks of the 1930s." The Guardian , 4 March 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/04/dali-enigma-picasso-protest-most-important-artworks-1930s.
• Jones, Jonathan. "Salvador Dalí's surreal dalliance with Nazism." The Guardian , 23 Sept. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/sep/23/salvador-dali-nazism-wallis-simpson.
• Meisler, Stanley. “The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí.” Smithsonian Magazine , Apr. 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-surreal-world-of-salvador-dali-78993324/.
• Ridingsept, Alan. “Unmasking a Surreal Egotist.” The New York Times , 28 Sept. 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/arts/design/unmasking-a-surreal-egotist.html?_r=0.
• Stolz, George. “The Great Late Salvador Dalí.” Art News , 5 Feb. 2005, www.artnews.com/2005/02/01/the-great-late-salvador-dal/.
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Salvador Dali

Salvador domingo felipe jacinto dalí i domènech, marquis de púbol.

• Born: May 11, 1904 ; Figueres, Spain  
• Died: January 23, 1989 ; Figueres, Spain  
• Active Years: 1917 - 1988
• Nationality: Spanish , Catalan
• Art Movement: Surrealism
• Field: painting , sculpture , drawing , photography
• Influenced by: Giorgio de Chirico , Arnold Böcklin , Pablo Picasso , Joan Miro , Yves Tanguy , Max Ernst , Jean-Francois Millet , Hieronymus Bosch , Dada , High Renaissance
• Influenced on: Max Ernst , Jackson Pollock , Mark Rothko , Surrealism , Abstract Expressionism , Pop Art , Performance Art , Conceptual Art
• Pupils: Carlos Quizpez Asín
• Art institution: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain
• Friends and Co-workers: Man Ray , Andy Warhol , Maruja Mallo , Valentine Hugo
• Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dalí

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An author, artist and provocateur, Salvador Dalí was one of the most notable figures of the Surrealist movement. Born in 1904 in Figueras, Catalonia, Dalí studied art in Madrid and Barcelona, where he demonstrated masterful painting skills and experimented with several artistic styles. In the late 1920s, two chief influences emerged that shaped his mature artistic style. The first was the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that explored the erotic significance of dreams and subconscious imagery. The second was his introduction to the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to unlock the creative potential of the human unconscious. In 1929, Dalí burst onto the art scene with the debut of Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929), a short silent surrealist film he made with Spanish director Luis Buñuel. The film propelled the authors to the center of the French surrealist circle led by André Breton. Between 1929 and 1973, Dalí produced some of the most famous surrealist paintings, including his masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting depicts a dreamworld in which common objects are deformed and displayed bizarrely and irrationally: watches, solid and hard objects appear to be inexplicably limp and melting in the desolate landscape. In the painting, he effortlessly integrates the real and the imaginary in order “to systemize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality”. Dalí’s most important contribution to Surrealism was the paranoiac-critical method , a surrealist technique he developed in the 1930s. The technique required the artist to enter a unique state of mind which he described as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative association of the phenomena of delirium”. He also published essays in which he discussed and defined the surrealist object , such as Lobster Telephone[/i[/url]] (1936) and Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) were usually constructed from found items or readymade materials. In the late 1930s, Dalí began painting in a more academic style influenced by the Renaissance masters. His admiration for Raphael is particularly evident in paintings such as Poetry of America (1943), Raphaelesque Head Exploding (1951), and Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna (1954). Throughout the 1930s, Dalí’s ambiguous political stance on fascism alienated him from his Surrealist colleagues, which eventually expelled Dalí from the movement. In 1940, during World War II, Dalí and his wife Gala moved to the United States. Henceforth, Dalí worked in a variety of media, designing theatre sets, furniture, jewelry, and even display windows for fashionable shops. In 1942, he published his most intriguing book, the autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali . Dalí and Gala returned to Spain in 1948. The artist continued to be prolific in the late stages of his career, he worked on a variety of projects, while continuing to produce paintings, sculptures, and objects. He was also particularly fond of publicity stunts and was able to intrigue the public for decades with his outrageous behavior. Dalí died of heart failure on January 23, 1989, in Figueres, Spain.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), known professionally as Salvador Dalí (/ˈdɑːli, dɑːˈli/ Catalan: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]; Spanish: [salβaˈðoɾ ðaˈli]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors. Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on 11 May 1904, at 8:45 am GMT, on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 (presently 6), in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. In the summer of 1912, the family moved to the top floor of Carrer Monturiol 24 (presently 10). Dalí's older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12 October 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on 1 August 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute." Images of his long-dead brother would reappear embedded in his later works, including Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963). Dalí also had a sister, Anna Maria, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dalí as Seen by His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football (soccer) together. Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, he also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres in 1919, a site he would return to decades later. In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

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Style - 78 artworks

Style - 41 artworks, style - 792 artworks, abstract expressionism, genre - 210 artworks, genre painting, genre - 64 artworks, genre - 8 artworks, genre - 192 artworks, genre - 44 artworks, genre - 12 artworks, self-portrait, genre - 19 artworks, mythological painting, genre - 31 artworks, nude painting (nu), genre - 27 artworks, genre - 9 artworks, symbolic painting, genre - 174 artworks, animal painting, genre - 2 artworks, genre - 22 artworks, allegorical painting, genre - 24 artworks, religious painting, genre - 154 artworks, genre - 14 artworks, illustration, genre - 17 artworks, genre - 30 artworks, installation, genre - 3 artworks, media - 16 artworks, early years (1917-1927), period - 174 artworks, transitional period (1927-1928), period - 31 artworks, surrealism period (1929-1940), period - 268 artworks, classic period (1941-1989), period - 643 artworks, the seven arts, series - 8 artworks, the biblia sacra, series - 91 artworks, lobster/aphrodisiac telephone, series - 11 artworks, hieronymus bosch, c.1450 - 1516, jean-francois millet, 1814 - 1875, arnold böcklin, 1827 - 1901, pablo picasso, 1881 - 1973, valentine hugo, 1887 - 1968, giorgio de chirico, 1888 - 1978, 1890 - 1976, 1891 - 1976, 1893 - 1983, yves tanguy, 1900 - 1955, carlos quizpez asín, 1900 - 1983, maruja mallo, 1902 - 1995, mark rothko, 1903 - 1970, serge brignoni, 1903 - 2002, joseph cornell, 1903 - 1972, arshile gorky, c.1904 - 1948, francis bott, 1904 - 1998, jackson pollock, 1912 - 1956, andy warhol, 1928 - 1987.

• World Biography

Salvador Dali Biography

Born: May 11, 1904 Barcelona, Spain Died: January 23, 1989 Figueras, Spain Spanish painter and artist

The Spanish painter Salvador Dali was one of the best-known surrealist artists (artists who seek to express the contents of the unconscious mind). Blessed with an enormous talent for drawing, he painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise way.

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, near Barcelona, Spain. He was the son of Salvador and Felipa Dome (Domenech) Dali. His father was a notary (one who witnesses the signing of important documents). According to Dali's autobiography (the story of his own life), his childhood was filled with fits of anger against his parents and classmates and he received cruel treatment from them in response. He was an intelligent child, producing advanced drawings at an early age.

Dali attended the Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueras, Spain. By 1921 he convinced his father that he could make a living as an artist and was allowed to go to Madrid, Spain, to study painting. He was strongly influenced by the dreamlike works of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). He also experimented with cubism (a type of art in which objects are viewed in terms of geometry—the science of points, lines, and surfaces). He was briefly imprisoned for political activities against the government and was finally thrown out of art school in 1925.

Association with surrealist movement

In the early 1930s many of the surrealists began to break away from the movement, feeling that direct political action had to come before any artistic revolutions. Dali put forth his "Paranoic-Critical method" as a way to avoid having to politically conquer the world. He felt that by using his own vision to color reality to his liking it would become unnecessary to actually change the world. The Paranoic-Critical method meant that Dali had trained himself to possess the power to look at one object and "see" another. This did not apply only to painting; it meant that Dali could take a myth that was interpreted a certain way and impose upon it his own personal ideas.

A key event in Dali's life during this time was meeting his wife, Gala, who was at that time married to another surrealist. She became his main influence, both in his personal life and in many of his paintings. Toward the end of the 1930s, Dali's exaggerated view of himself began to annoy others. André Breton (1896–1966), a French poet and critic who was a leading surrealist, angrily expelled Dali from the surrealist movement. Dali continued to be very successful in painting as well as in writing, stage design, and films, but his seriousness as an artist began to be questioned. He took a strong stand against abstract (unrealistic) art and began to paint Catholic subjects in the same tight style that had previously described his personal nightmares.

Later years

In 1974 Dali broke with English business manager Peter Moore and had the rights to his art sold out from under him by other business managers, leaving him with none of the profits. In 1980 a man named A. Reynolds Morse of Cleveland, Ohio, set up an organization called Friends to Save Dali. Dali was said to have been cheated out of much of his wealth, and the goal of the foundation was to put him back on solid financial (relating to money) ground.

In 1983 Dali exhibited many of his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. This show made him hugely famous in Spain and brought him further into favor with the Spanish royal family and major collectors around the world. After 1984 Dali was confined to a wheelchair after suffering injuries in a house fire.

Dali died on January 23, 1989, in Figueras, Spain. He was remembered as the subject of much controversy (dispute), although in his last years, the controversy had more to do with his associates and their dealings than with Dali himself.

For More Information

Carter, David A. Salvador Dali. New York: Chelsea House, 1995.

Dalí, Salvador. Diary of a Genius. New York: Doubleday, 1965.

Dali, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. New York: Dial Press, 1942. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1993.

Descharnes, Robert. The World of Salvador Dali. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Etherington-Smith, Meredith. The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali. New York: Random House, 1992.

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Salvador Dalí

Left: Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989). The Accommodations of Desire , 1929. Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on cardboard; 8 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. (22.2 x 34.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 (1999.363.16). Right: Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989). Madonna , 1958. Oil on canvas; 88 7/8 x 75 1/4 in. (225.7 x 191.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Drue Heinz, in memory of Henry J. Heinz II, 1987 (1987.465). Both: © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society

«My family has a penchant for strolling through museums. I've appreciated this more as I've gotten older, but as a kid I got bored easily. Pausing before a piece by Salvador Dalí was always an incredible relief, and I came to crave the fluid style and disturbing clutter of his work.»

I think my interest in Dalí was first piqued by an animated film adaptation of Don Quixote , Miguel de Cervantes's epic novel, that I saw when I was five years old. I loved it, and even forced my grandparents to endure several re-screenings, before they showed me a few Dalí works inspired by the novel. I was enthralled. Whenever I went to the Metropolitan Museum after that, I made a beeline for Dalí's work.

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989). Study for Don Quixote , ca. 1956. Ink on paper; 7 1/8 x 7 in. (18.1 x 17.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Melinda and Alexander Liberman, 1994 (1994.591.3) © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society

Dalí became an ever-present figure in my mind. I respected him for popularizing Surrealism , but as a strange kid, I was primarily captivated by his authentic, all-around strangeness. His brilliant mustache punctuated the haze of my daydreams and became a motif in my doodles. The more I learned about his life and work, the more I felt he’d ignited a peculiar phenomenon. In creating artwork concerned with dreams, he sent real tremors along the divide of fantasy and reality.

Yet there is one Dalí painting at the Met that I never liked much until recently. In Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) , Christ is suspended in front of an unfolded hypercube over a checkered floor. Dalí's wife and muse, Gala, stares up at Christ with an expression that could be awe, devotion, or religious fervor.

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989). Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) , 1954. Oil on canvas; 76 1/2 x 48 3/4 in. (194.3 x 123.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1955 (55.5) © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society

The idea of a hypercube was at first incoherent to me, but I'll try to explain. A hypercube is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Extending a cube into the fourth dimension creates a hypercube. A cube has six faces, and a hypercube has eight cells (a cell is a three-dimensional component of a four-dimensional object). This painting contains an unfolded hypercube; just as you can unfold the six faces of a three-dimensional cube into two-dimensional space to create the shape of a cross, you can unfold a hypercube into a three-dimensional crucifix.

Dalí uses this projection of a four-dimensional shape in three dimensions as a literal representation of the transition of Christ from one dimension to the other. This painting, it seems, is concerned with faith and logic; it asks us to think about the nature of and relationship between God, man, and science. It captures a surreal aspect of divine geometry while maintaining a reverential atmosphere. Dalí's work is rarely as balanced and obliquely clever as Corpus Hypercubus , a painting I can finally appreciate.

See more works by Salvador Dalí in the Museum's collection.

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Advanced tickets recommended, plus don't miss Dalí Alive 360° in The Dalí Dome. Reserve tickets.

A Century of Salvador Dalí

The man. The master. The marvel. Salvador Dalí is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. His fiercely technical yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures and visionary explorations in film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression. From his personal life to his professional endeavors, he always took great risks and proved how rich the world can be when you dare to embrace pure, boundless creativity.

Discover the life and legend of Salvador Dalí, and get to know the people, places and events that transformed this Spanish son into a surrealist sensation. The following timeline outlines the chronology of Dalí's life and work.

The Surreal Journey Begins

Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 to parents Salvador Dalí Cusi, a prominent notary, and Felipa Domenech Ferres, a gentle mother who often indulged young Salvador’s eccentric behavior. Felipa was a devout Catholic and the elder Salvador an Atheist, which was a combination that heavily influenced their son’s worldview. Dalí’s artistic talent was obvious from a young age, and both of his parents supported it—though it is known that the relationship with his disciplinarian father was strained. Ultimately, Dalí’s raw creativity and defiant attitude would distance him from his father, but it would also become the cornerstone of his wildly imaginative artistic feats.

Surreal Fact

In 1903, Horatio Jackson made the first automobile trip across America. It took him 64 full days to drive from San Francisco to NYC.

Budding Brilliance

Dalí’s father quickly realized that his son wasn’t fit for public school, so he enrolled 6-year-old Salvador in the Hispano-French School of the Immaculate Conception where he learned French, the primary language he would later use as an artist. Dalí spent his childhood and early adolescence in Catalonia—school years in Figueres and breaks in the coastal village of Cadaques where his family had a summer home. There, he drew and painted the seaside landscape and met his early mentor Ramon Pichot. Cadaques is also where Dalí’s parents built him his first art studio.

In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. It took two years to recover Leonardo da Vinci's missing masterpiece.

School Is Out. Surrealism Is In.

Dalí’s tumultuous 1920s life perfectly reflected the decade’s “roaring” nickname. Four years after being accepted to the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid, he was expelled after refusing to be examined in the theory of art and declaring the examiners incompetent to judge him. He experimented with futurism, impressionism and cubism, and during one of his several trips to Paris, movement leader Andre Breton exposed him to the world of Surrealism. In 1925, Dalí had his first solo exhibition in Barcelona, and the decade saw his works showcased throughout the world. After leaving the Academy, Dalí returned to Catalonia where his art became increasingly bizarre and even grotesque.

In 1925, a diphtheria outbreak in rural Alaska prompted 18 dog-sled teams to travel 674 miles to bring medicine to those in need. The Iditarod commemorates this trek every year.

Trials, Trouble and Travel

The thirties watched Dalí transform from a key figure in the Surrealist movement into its enemy. After becoming a prominent figure of the group, he was nearly expelled after a “trial” in 1934. His dismissal was due to his apolitical stance, his personal feud with leader Andre Breton, and his public antics. In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started and Dalí and his wife remained in Paris, where he continued evolving his artistic style. He was heavily influenced by the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, whom Dalí met in 1938. In 1939 Andre Breton definitively expelled Dalí from Surrealism.

When Betty Boop made her cartoon debut in 1930, her character was actually a dog and not a woman.

Inspiring Awe In America

Dalí and Gala spent the better part of the 1940s in America after fleeing WWII. During the couple’s eight years stateside, New York’s MOMA gallery presented the artist’s first retrospective and he explored new creative expressions on film. He teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock to create dream-like sequences for Spellbound and was later hired by Walt Disney to complete the art and storyboards for what would ultimately become the film Destino. At the very end of the decade and from the comfort of this homeland Catalonia, Dalí entered his noteworthy classical period.

Naval engineer Richard James invented the Slinky toy by accident when he was trying to build a ship horsepower monitor using steel tension springs during WWII.

Mystical Measures

Salvador Dalí was in the heart of his classical period throughout the 1950s. He created nineteen large canvases characterized by meticulously detailed images of religious, historical and scientific themes, or what Dalí called “nuclear mysticism.” He became obsessed with geometry, DNA, divinity and experimented heavily with visual illusions. From a personal perspective, his growing affinity for religious themes prompted he and Gala, his muse and the love of his life, to remarry—this time, in a Catholic church.

The C.I.A. secretly funded and revised the 1954 animated film version of George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm.

An Icon In Every Dimension

From awe-inspiring works to distinctively high praise, Dalí continued breaking boundaries throughout the sixties. He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, one of Spain’s highest distinctions and began work on what would become the Teatro-Museo Dalí (The Dalí Theatre-Museum) in his hometown of Figueres All the while, Dalí’s deepening interests in space and science were powerfully reflected in his work. He strived to explore and challenge what was possible in the third dimension, and became fascinated with the fourth, or immortality.

In 1962, three incarcerated criminals attempted to escape Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on an inflatable raft. It is still unknown whether they were successful or died in the act.

Evolving Perspectives

Even as he aged and his health began to decline, Salvador Dalí remained resilient in his artistic quest to examine life from every possible angle. He continued to paint—endlessly challenging visual norms with holographic and stereoscopic imagery—all the while dedicating much of his time to opening the Teatro-Museo Dalí, which still sits just a few blocks away from his birthplace. Moreover, Dalí remained a prominent public figure and celebrity with retrospectives exhibiting all over the world.

The world’s first gourmet jelly bean brand (later dubbed Jelly Belly) debuted in 1975 with unusual flavors like licorice, root beer, cream soda and tangerine.

Death Or Immortality?

In the last years of his life, and following the death of his dear wife Gala, Dalí painted less and less. Still fascinated by the ideas of immortality and the fourth dimension, his last works were mathematical in nature—challenging the plasticity of life as we know it. In 1984, Dalí was severely injured in a house fire at his Pubol castle and was confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Friends, followers and fellow artists then moved him back to Figueres to live at the Teatro-Museo where he died of heart failure on January 23, 1989 at the age of 84.

In 1985, denture manufacturers stopped using radioactive uranium in their porcelain. The toxic material was added for decades to give false teeth a natural look.

Living On Through Imagination

Even after death, Salvador Dalí’s star didn’t fade. In 1990, his estate was split between Madrid and Catalonia, and many prominent exhibitions of the artist’s work continued to show throughout the world. From Montreal, London and Spain to Tokyo, Venice and the United States, Dalí’s indescribable talent and extraordinary creativity has become a universal language of fearlessness, inspiration and relentless self-expression. The Dalí Museum continues to honor the work and memory of its namesake with an expansive permanent collection, educational programming and world-class exhibits featuring other notable artists, including Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.

Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned, was born in 1996 and lived for six and a half years.

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Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dali spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family’s summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Lligat. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain.

The young Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early recognition of Dali’s talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread (now in the Museum’s collection), were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.

The following year, Dali held his first one-man show in Paris. He also joined the surrealists, led by former Dadaist Andre Breton. That year, Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. She became Dali’s lover, muse, business manager, and chief inspiration.

Dali soon became a leader of the Surrealist Movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory, with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the Surrealists and was “expelled” from the surrealist group during a “trial” in 1934. He did however, exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade but by 1940, Dali was moving into a new type of painting with a preoccupation with science and religion.

Dali and Gala escaped from Europe during World War II, spending 1940-48 in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed in 1942 by the publication of Dali’s autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.

As Dali moved away from Surrealism and into his classic period, he began his series of 19 large canvases, many concerning scientific, historical or religious themes. Among the best known of these works are The Hallucinogenic Toreador, and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in the museum’s collection, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

In 1974, Dali opened the Teatro Museo in Figueres, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala in 1982, Dali’s health began to fail. It deteriorated further after he was burned in a fire in his home in Pubol in 1984. Two years later, a pace-maker was implanted. Much of this part of his life was spent in seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his apartments at Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo. Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications.

As an artist, Salvador Dali was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dali worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, films, photographs, performance pieces, jewels and objects of all descriptions. As important, he left for posterity the permission to explore all aspects of one’s own life and to give them artistic expression.

Whether working from pure inspiration or on a commissioned illustration, Dali’s matchless insight and symbolic complexity are apparent. Above all, Dali was a superb draftsman. His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the art of the twentieth century.

Biography Online

Biography Salvador Dali

Short bio Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was one of the most iconic painters of the Twentieth Century, with a range of imaginative, striking and surrealist work. His repertoire was influenced by classical Renaissance masters, but he also enjoyed painting with a new avant-garde approach, which investigated the role of the sub-conscious and dream world. As well as painting, he became involved in film, sculpture and photography.

Dali was born in Catalonia (a region of Spain in 1904) on 11 May in Figueras. He placed great emphasis on his Arabic lineage (descendant of the Moors); he stated that this Arabic lineage influenced his approach to life and was a factor behind his love of luxury and oriental clothes.

Dali had a habit of doing eccentric things which polarised opinions. His eccentric manner was a reflection of his art and vice versa. The fact that he was always in the limelight made his paintings more famous. He could also display a supreme confidence.

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

– Salvador Dali

“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.”

Early life of Dali

Dali was brought up by a strict father, close to the French border of Catalonia. However, his artistic side was encouraged by a domestic servant. He later went to drawing school and by the time he was 15, had his first public art exhibition in Figueres.

In 1921, after the death of his mother, he moved to Madrid, where he devoted more time to art. He experimented with Cubism and Dada, two new strands in modern art. He also became well known for his distinctive, eccentric dress sense. His rebellious attitude culminated in 1926 when he was expelled from art school just before his exams. Dali had complained no one in his art school was sufficiently competent to judge him.

A Dali painting

After leaving art school, he travelled to Paris, where he became friendly with Pablo Picasso . Picasso was a significant influence on the young Dali, and some of his early works were inspired by Picasso’s style. But, Dali was never an imitator, he was always seeking to incorporate cutting-edge avant-garde styles into his work. His work became increasingly well known, and reviews were mixed with art critics increasingly polarised by the work of Dali.

In 1928, Dali was visited by fellow surrealist artists Andre Breton, Rene Magritte and the poet Paul Eluard. Dali began painting the Gala – wife of Eluard – and Dali and Gala fell in love. By the time the painting session had finished, Gala broke off with her husband Eluard and began a lifelong partnership with Dali.

In 1930, Dali and Gala settled in the port of Lligat on the northeast coast of Spain in Catalonia. They lived in an old fisherman’s hut, which Dali transformed into a surreal labyrinth of stairs and corridors. The two were close until Gala’s death in 1982. In later paintings, Dali often painted Gala as a goddess or saint.

The persistence of memory

In 1931, Dali painted one of his most famous works, ‘The Persistence of Memory’. Sometimes called ‘Soft Watches’ or ‘Melting Clocks,’ the work introduced the surrealistic image of a soft, melting pocket watch. It is has become an iconic artwork of the twentieth century – amongst other things it points to the illusion of time. Dali wanted to bring his dream world into his art. He was fascinated with the riddle, symbolism and the challenging imagery of dreams. There was also an element that Dali liked to shock – and his art tended to create strong opinions of love or dislike.

Salvador Dali wrote on the importance and symbolism of surrealism.

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

When Franco rose to power in 1936, Dali was one of the few Spanish intellectuals to support Franco; this left him a lifelong association with Fascism, which coloured many people’s views of Dali. In 1935, he was excluded from the surrealist group by Breton because of his fascination with Adolf Hitler. Fellow artists, who were often of a different political persuasion, felt betrayed by Dali’s support for Fascism.

As World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States in 1940, where they lived for eight years. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí . In 1949 he returned to Catalonia living under Franco’s regime.

In the post-war years, Dali continued to be inventive, experimenting with unusual media, such as holography, 4D and bulletist works. Some art contained optical illusions, and his work had an influence on future pop art.

“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”

In 1971 he opened a Dali Museum in Cleveland, which was later moved to Florida. He also began work on Dali Theater and museum in his hometown of Figueres. This proved to be an important body of his work.

In 1982, he was awarded the title the Marquis of Pubol by King Juan Carlos of Spain.

Dali died in 1989, at the age of 84, from heart failure. He is buried in the crypt of Teatro Museo in Figueres.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Salvador Dali ”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net Published 26 Dec. 2012. Last updated 28 February 2020.

Secret Life of Salvador Dali

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Salvador Dali Biography

Salvador Dali is one of the most celebrated artists of his time. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech, as he is known as in full, was born on 11th May 1904 in Spain.

Probably the most famous of the surrealist artists he famous for his explorations of conscious imagery, which has made him a Surrealist icon.

He is best known for his 1931 painting of melting clocks on a landscape setting, The persistence of Memory.

Salvador Dali was encouraged to practice his art from an early age, which led him to join an academy in Madrid.

He later went to Paris in 1920, where he began interacting with artists of the modern era such as Rene Magritte and Pablo Picasso, who inspired Dali’s first Surrealist paintings phase.

Salvador Dali was born to a middle-class lawyer and notary father who had a strict disciplinary approach to raising him, often contradicting his mother, who was from an artistic family.

She indulged the young Spanish artist in his art and early eccentricities and encouraged his creativity.

The early life of Dali shaped his art in that, even though he was a very intelligent and precocious child, he often faced anger against his father and his more dominant schoolmates.

His father never tolerated any outbursts, and he punished young Dali seriously, which greatly affected their relationship.

His sister, Anna Maria, was born some years later in 1908 when young Dali’s father enrolled him at the State Primary School.

Salvador Dali couldn’t keep up with public schooling, so his father decided to enroll him at the Hispano French School of Immaculate Conception, Figueres after the first failed attempt.

At his new school, Salvador learned French, which later became very instrumental in his art career and cultural journey.

Salvador discovered Impressionism art while living with the Pichot family of intellectuals and artists at the Moli de la Torre estate on the outskirts of Figueres.

Salvador Dali was just 14 when his works were first exhibited in Figueres as part of a show.

Three years after his first exhibition, Salvador Dali was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where he was expelled without a diploma.

Dali criticized his teachers and allegedly started a riot over the school’s professorship choice and declared that no faculty member was competent enough to examine him.

He feared he was too intelligent for the professors there as he had been learning more from the French art magazines than from his “out of touch” professors.

He was arrested for allegedly supporting the Separatist movement in the same year and imprisoned briefly in Gerona even though he was apolitical at the time.

Salvador Dali Types of Work

Salvador Dali spent most of his life promoting his art and leaving the world in awe.

He loved creating a sensation and a controversy at the same time, as shown by his drawing, SacredHeart featuring the words, ‘Sometimes I Spit With Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.’ Salvador was influenced a lot by publicity and the fortune that came with it.

According to various art critics, Dali’s paintings peaked artistically in his 20s and 30s; then, he gave himself over to greed and exhibitionism.

Salvador was fiercely technical, and he painted highly unusual paintings, visionary explorations, and sculptures in life-size interactive art and film.

He is responsible for some of the most iconic Spanish paintings and imagery.

His work ushered in a new generation of Imaginative expression after he showed the world how rich it could be when you dared to embrace boundless and pure creativity, which he did using both his personal life and his professional endeavors.

The life and legend of Salvador Dali is what transformed him into the Spanish surrealist sensation he is.

The discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists led to the start and development of his mature artistic style where he started inducing hallucinatory states in himself through “paranoiac-critical.”

As a Surrealist artist, Dali depicted a dream world in which objects in commonplace were deformed, metamorphized bizarrely and irrationally or juxtaposed, as illustrated by one of his most enigmatic work, “The Persistence of Memory.”

He also expanded his artistic exploration into filmmaking and worked with Luis Bunuel, a Spanish director to make two Surrealistic films, An Andalusian Dog, ( Un Chien Andalou, 1929) and The Golden Age, ( L Age d’or, 1930), both of which are filled with grotesque but very suggestive images.

His art appeared years later in another film, Spellbound, by Alfred Hitchcock, in a dream sequence in the film.

Salvador’s art took a turn in the late 1930s to a more academic style after being influenced by Renaissance paintings .

Dali had some ambivalent political views, which led to him being alienated by his Surrealist colleagues during the rise of fascism.

He then moved to the United States where he spent most of his time designing jewelry, theater sets, fashion shops interiors. He had become a notorious figure of the Surrealist movement by 1930 and mid-1930s for his artwork and personality.

Subject Matter of His Artwork; Dali Theatre Museum

In the two decades leading to 1970, Dali’s work had a religious theme, even though he continued to use erotic subjects to represent his childhood.

Dali’s most revealing and interesting book is The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942).

Over the next 15 years, Salvador entered a “Nuclear Mysticism Period” when he painted a series of 19 large canvases that were inclusive of historical, scientific, and religious themes.

His work illustrated images depicting the DNA, religious themes of chastity, divine geometry, and the Hyper Cube.

He spent his time between 1970 and 1974 creating the TeatroMuseo Dali, Dali Theatre Museum but later dissolved his relationship with other business managers when all rights to his work were sold without his consent.

Dali was forced to retire from painting in 1980 when he developed a motor disorder and couldn’t hold a paintbrush anymore.

There was a major anthological exhibition of 400 works by Salvador in 1983 in Madrid, Figueres, and Barcelona, where his last pictorial works date from this period.

His wife later died in 1982, which sent him to depression, and he moved to Pubol, where he was burnt severely in a fire in 1984, leaving him confined to a wheelchair.

His friends, fellow artists, and patrons relocated him back to Figueres, at the comfort of the TeatroMuseo where he died of heart failure in 1989. Salvador Dali’s death was honored with a major retrospective exhibition at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart — Salvador Dali , 1904 to 1989.

Salvador Dali Biography

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Emporda region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dali's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dali i Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dali was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dali said, "...[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."

Dali also had a sister, Ana Maria, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dali As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.

Dali attended drawing school. In 1916, Dali also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dali's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dali's mother died of breast cancer. Dali was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dali's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dali did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

In 1922, Dali moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7 in.) tall, Dali already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepin Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Garcia Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dali rejected the poet's sexual advances.

However, it was his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, that earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of these early works, Dali probably did not completely understand the Cubist movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dali illustrated a book for the first time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dali also experimented with Dada, Dada artists like Max Ernst influenced his work throughout his life. Dali was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread , painted in 1926. That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso , whom the young Dali revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dali from Joan Miro . As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dali made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miro.

Some trends in Dali's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dali devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant garde His classical influences included Raphael , Bronzino, Rembrandt van Rijn , Johannes Vermeer , and Diego Velazquez . He used both classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dali grew a flamboyant moustache, influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velazquez . The moustache became an iconic trademark of his appearance for the rest of his life.

In late 1920s, Dali began to involved in Surrealism movement. Surrealism is a collective adventure that began in Paris shortly after the first World War, in the form of an association of individuals grouped around Andre Breton. Among the artists to participate in Surrealism were: Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst , Andre Masson, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali. The Surrealist movement was greatly influenced by the theories of psychologist Sigmund Freud , whose interest was dealing with the unconscious self. Surrealists often dealt with the id, ego and superego. According to The Ego and the ID by Freud , the id is the part of the unconscious that is the source of instinctive energy. The ego is the part of the psyche that reacts to the outside world. The superego mediates between the id and ego.

In 1929, Dali collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dali later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also, in August 1929, Dali met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dali had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dali called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.

Meanwhile, Dali's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dali y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait."

Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dali refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set foot in Cadaquès again. The following summer, Dali and Gala would rent a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea.

In 1931, Dali painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory . which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by insects.

Dali and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

Dali was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The exhibition in New York of Dali's works, including Persistence of Memory , created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dali Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere. In that year, Dali and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by heiress Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dali apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him about his apology for a surrealist act.

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dali maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading surrealist André Breton accused Dali of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dali quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." Dali insisted that surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism. Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dali was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dali retorted, "I myself am surrealism."

In 1936, Dali took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."

Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film Rose Hobart at Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dali became famous for another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to take place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring Dali's work. Dali was in the audience at the screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made,” he said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dali's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!"

At this stage, Dali's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward James. He had helped Dali emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and by supporting him financially for two years. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa .

In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an anagram for Salvador Dali, and a phonetic rendering of the French avide a dollars, which may be translated as "eager for dollars". This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dali's work, and the perception that Dali sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dali in the past tense, as if he were dead. The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dali until the time of his death and beyond.

In 1940, as World War II started in Europe, Dali and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dali returned to the practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dali never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.

In 1941, Dali drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali . He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald, depicting Dali dressing an automobile in an evening gown. Also in The Secret Life, Dali suggested that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. Buñuel was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal Spellman of New York went to see Iris Barry, head of the film department at MOMA. Buñuel then went back to Hollywood where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner Brothers from 1942 to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (English translation My Last Sigh published 1983), Buñuel wrote that, over the years, he rejected Dali's attempts at reconciliation.

An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dali while he was in France in 1947. In 2005, a sculpture of Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been claimed that Dali gave this work to his exorcist out of gratitude, and two Spanish art experts confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dali.

Starting in 1949, Dali spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists. As such, it is probable that the common dismissal of Dali's later works by some Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton organized an exhibit called Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dali, Joan Miro, Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dali's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.

Late in his career, Dali did not confine himself to painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Roy Lichtenstein proclaimed Dali an important influence on pop art. Dali also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dali, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary. Dali was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

Dali's post-World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he had been inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age". Therefore Dali labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as The Madonna of Port Lligat (first version) (1949) and Crucifixion (1954), Dali sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. "Nuclear Mysticism" included such notable pieces as La Gare de Perpignan (1965) and Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968-70). In 1960, Dali began work on the Dali Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.

In 1968, Dali filmed a television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates, and in 1969, he designed the Chupa Chups logo. Also in 1969, he was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and created a large metal sculpture that stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

In the television programme Dirty Dalì: A Private View broadcast on Channel 4 on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with Dali in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dali, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.

In 1980, Dali's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife, Gala, allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dali was a wreck, and his right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms.

In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed on Dali the title of Marqués de Dali de Púbol (English: Marquis of Dali de Púbol) in the nobility of Spain, hereby referring to Púbol, the place where he lived. The title was in first instance hereditary, but on request of Dali changed for life only in 1983. To show his gratitude for this, Dali later gave the king a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dali's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed.

Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dali lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt, or possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dali, or possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dali was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum in his final years.

There have been allegations that Dali was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in forgeries and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dali.

In November 1988, Dali entered the hospital with heart failure, and on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dali.

On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full circle, is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks from the house where he was born.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. ” -Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory

Swans reflecting elephants, the temptation of saint anthony, christ of saint john of the cross, the burning giraffe, crucifixion, archeological reminiscence of millet's "angelus", landscape with butterflies, the disintegration of the persistence of memory, melting watch, the madonna of port lligat, tuna fishing, the sacrament of the last supper, lobster telephone, the anthropomorphic cabinet, metamorphosis of narcissus, gala contemplating the mediterranean sea, raphaelesque head exploding, galatea of the spheres, spider of the evening.

Salvador Dali: A Life in Conflict

It’s a rare work of art that comes to represent the entire movement that birthed it: Monet’s Water Lillies and Impressionism, for example, or Millai’s Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites. In today’s case, nothing represents Surrealism quite like the image of a melting clock, and no artist better encapsulates the feel of Surrealism more than Salvador Dali.

If you know nothing about art — if you grew up inside that compound from The Village and have never even seen pencil put to paper — you know that melting clocks probably mean things are about to get weird. One of the most referenced images in the modern canon, inspiring jokes in everything from The Simpsons to Looney Tunes, The Persistence of Memory is the brainchild of none other than our boy Salvador, the genre-defining multi-media artist best known for living a life that was almost as weird as the subjects he painted.

Depending on the source, the melting clock represents either the impermanence of time, or the melting of cheese. It’s a deeply ironic image, but the greater irony lies in the fact that, during his life, the man who would come to represent Surrealism found himself kicked out of the movement by the very friends and colleagues who rose to fame with him.

Portrait of the Young Artist as a Portrait Artist

Born in 1904 to a middle class family, Dali began painting early, showing a formidable command of Impressionism, and had his first public gallery show at the age of 14. He was, by all accounts, a shy and introverted child, who spent much of his time playing around the rocky coast of Cadaqués, in Spain. It was a favorite vacation spot for his family, and the eventual site of his first and best-loved house.

While he and his sister were close, both of them often felt overshadowed by the ghost of their parents first child, who died at the age of 2 shortly before Dali’s birth. He would later paint a portrait of his brother, and often described him as “the first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute.” 

It’s impossible to overstate the impact Cadaqués had on Dali’s development as an artist. The alien, rocky shores visible on so many of his canvasses, the washed-out beaches populated by lone bathers, all of these trace back to the days he spent wandering around the tide pools, gazing in awe and horror at the full mystery of undersea life, amorphous jellyfish and radial sea urchins which he and his father loved to eat.

The figure of the sleeping head, referred to as The Great Masturbator, is rumored to have been inspired by one specific fallen boulder, arched like a kidney bean and pitted with a spongelike array of holes. One can easily envision a young Dali staring at this rock, imagining it some fantastical monster cowering over in the fetal position. Maybe he imagined it as himself, hiding from his father’s wrath.  

Even during his youth, their relationship was rocky. His father’s stringent discipline was softened by his mother’s dutiful coddling, though she died when he was only 16. He described it as “the greatest blow I had experienced in my life.” His father married his mother’s sister barely a year later, but this relationship did not seem to trouble Dali.

As disagreeable as they might have been, Dali’s father was an ardent supporter of his son’s artistic development, paying for books of Impressionist paintings and personal tutors. He even went so far as to arrange a gallery showing for his 17 year old son. The location was the Municipal Theater in Figueres, which would later become the Dali Theater and Museum, the very building he would eventually die in. 

If Dali ever remarked upon the irony of dying in the place which birthed him as an artist, it was never recorded. As it would eventually be Dali’s controversial art which drove them apart, one must wonder if his father ever regretted supporting his creative endeavors in the first place.

So much drama and strife, birthed from a single act of support! Let this be a lesson to the fathers listening today: Never support your children, lest they become the next Salvadore Dali.

The Art of Confidence

In college, Salvador Dali studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There, he made friends with artists like Luis Buñuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca, the latter of whom held a deep and unrequited passion for the Dali. 

Now, it’s easy to start from the popular image of adult Dali as an exuberant anteater-owning weirdo and simply make it smaller to represent youth, but he was actually quite shy in school. Among his friends he was considered to be bad with girls, a trait which would very much resolve itself with sufficient fame.

He and his friends studied the art movements emerging in Barcelona and Paris, as well as the new and controversial theories of academics like Freud. Dali would go on to paint some of the first Cubist works ever produced in Madrid, starting with the geometric Cabaret Scene. Though it often takes over a thousand words to describe a picture, it’s easy to say this one like if Keith Harring did the cover art for a smooth jazz album sold exclusively at Starbucks.

After accusing his professors of being unqualified to judge him, he dropped out shortly before his final exams in 1926. Normally, that kind of stunt lands you in a factory sewing belt buckles onto hats. But when you’re already friends with Pablo Picasso, all that was left for Dali to do was to grow a mustache and start blowing people’s minds.

The Secret To Good Art Is Artistry

By the time he failed to graduate, Dali had already cultivated an image of an eccentric dandy, dressing in stockings and knee-breeches, like he was a lesser aristocrat waiting in line at the guillotine. It’s somewhat refreshing to know that art school kids remain unchanged across history and geography, with the notable exception that the weirdly dressed art school dropouts you know never went on to become Salvador Dali. His secret, and in fact, the unspoken rule across all artistic pursuits, is that you can get away with being a weird, pretentious dork as long as your work is very, very good.

In all accounts, young Dali’s work is that good . His absolute mastery of representationalism can be seen in Basket of Bread 1926, where he managed to lend an air of stark drama to a painting of a few slices of buttered bread. That painting is over 90 years old, and it’s still fresher than anything served at the Olive Garden. One almost gets the sense that he is mocking his teachers and peers, showing off by putting so much effort into such a simple scene. It sounds ridiculous to say that an oil painting of bread feels sarcastic if you look at it too long, but just try it. Look at it too long. Tell me if it doesn’t eventually feel insulting, how accurately this bread is painted. 

A common criticism of modern art is that it’s deliberately weird and incomprehensible to cover for a lack of foundational skills, and to be fair, it often is. For every actually talented eccentric, there’s twenty Piero Manzonis pooping into a can and daring you to buy it. Dali was not this. He was a popular, charismatic young fellow who knew the breadth of his skills and pushed himself beyond what his conscious mind could envision.

Paranoia and Friends

To that end, he studied Freud heavily, seeking to unleash the full weight of his creative forces from the shackles of formal logic. At that time, the surrealist movement was lost in a directionless mire, preoccupied with automatic processes of creation, and to this mix Dali added his Paranoiac-Critical method.

By focusing on abstract threats to the person in order to induce a paranoid state, Dali was able to draw up fantastical images from the deepest recesses of his mind, delivering “hand-painted dream photographs” by filtering the real world through that lens of absolute paranoia. In much the same way that humans see faces in toast or wood grain, Dali could envision armies of ants, giant eggs, elephants with impossibly stretched limbs, and bulbous protrusions of flesh held up by crutches.

This period is marked by the frequently recycled image of a child and parent on the coastline, one inspired by a childhood photo of Dali himself. Where human figures are depicted, they are small and face away from the viewer. Geometric shapes stack piled atop each other in defiance of balance and gravity, early works like The First Days of Spring and Apparatus and Hand show the clear influence of his contemporary and friend Yves Tanguy, whose art also heavily features indecipherable objects and vague, rocky coasts. Yves was also known for eating live spiders at parties. Earning a reputation as an artist has never been easy.

According to the niece of Yves Tanguy, Dali once said to her “I pinched everything from your uncle Yves.” Of course, being part of an artistic movement means influencing and being influenced by others in turn. If it wasn’t for his early studies of Cubism, Dali wouldn’t have been inspired to experiment with form, is he a plagiarist for borrowing the techniques of his friend Picasso? Would Dali have been Dali had he not drawn from the influences he did?

During the debut of a film Dali wrote, Age of Gold , the right-wing radical group League of Patriots disrupted the screening, attacked the audience, and smashed artworks by Yves and other collaborators, decrying the film and Surrealism in general as a poison designed to corrupt the people. The Surrealists responded to this criticism, as all great artists do, by getting much weirder.

Dali’s fascination with Freud took the forefront. As his reputation grew, he found himself liberated to commit his illicit desires to canvass, drawing nude forms tortured beyond recognition. Sex became a curious kind of obsession, something he could have gained very easily which yet was denied through a complex web of invisible hangups. 

Maybe he hoped if he delved deep enough into his own subconscious, he could find the source of those hangups and allow himself to pursue his desires, rather than exorcise them upon the canvas. Thankfully for us, he didn’t! 

Time Keeps On Slippin’

Indulge me for a moment in a bit of postmodern analysis, for it seems irresponsible to talk about an artist without talking about his art.

As you’re probably aware, it depicts a number of soft, melting watches, draped over a variety of shapes such as a tree, sleeping figure, and odd rectangular protrusion. The background is just a distant coastline, complete with shadowy Cadaqués cliffs.

 It’s easy to read the soft watches as a commentary on the malleable nature of time, given Dali’s public appreciation of Einstein’s theories. Lacking rigidity and internal structure, devoured by a thousand tiny ants, the ultimate symbol of structure and order finds itself besieged by the forces of decay.

Of course, Dali denied all that, saying instead the image was a surrealist interpretation of runny Camembert cheese he saw at a picnic. The man loved food! He even wrote a cookbook, which has recently been reissued. In addition to being both large and expensive, many of the recipes are deliberately difficult to prepare and assemble.

Either way, The melting clock is a motif he would revisit decades later, during his Nuclear Mysticism phase, in The Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory, where the previously solid shapes have been replaced with a matrix of smaller cubes, referencing the empty space between atoms. Even the ocean in the background finds itself peeled upwards like a pancake mid-flip.

The realization that everything solid is made up of empty space clearly held a place of prominence in Dali’s mind. The trees in Disintegration are marked by prominent gaps in their own continuity. Everything coherent has been replaced by a grid of tiny versions of themselves, a perfect approximation of atomic representationalism.

What subconscious desire was to Dali’s old work, atoms were to the Nuclear Mysticism phase. One prominent example, Galatea of the Spheres, features a deep field of orbs which resemble, when taken as a whole, a bust of his muse Gala. The spheres themselves seem to whirl and dance across the canvass, recalling how hair moves in wind, or electrons spin around a nucleus.

If you asked him, Dali would have denied the existence of any messages in his work. In the Dick Cavette interview where he unleashed an anteater on the host, he answered that the melting clock had “no meaning,” that his paintings were “hypnogogical images” drawn from the subconscious five minutes before waking.

That conflicts with the theories of Freud, which would posit a great deal of meaning in the sometimes graphically sexual imagery Dali used in his work, like the condom-shod loaf in Catalan Bread , complete with a lovingly draped melting clock.

Obviously, it’s a phallic representation. But the point of Surrealism is that what an object represents is not fixed, a rotting donkey can mean sexual excitement if you happen to be a swarm of flies. When Dali once famously asked at a restaurant, “When I order lobster, why do you not bring me a telephone?” He wasn’t just being precious, he was asking us to evaluate our assumptions about the meaning of images. What authority gets to define the significance of a melting clock? Or a randy loaf of bread? 

The point of Surrealism is to bring forth a solid dream into the waking world, and what authority assigns meaning to dreams? Dali explained that to him, the crutch symbolizes impotence, that it supports softness which cannot stand on its own. But to someone with one leg, a crutch might represent the difference between helplessness and agency. Is that interpretation less valid because it disagrees with the artist?

Dali & His Muse

It’s in 1929 that Dali’s upward trajectory becomes undeniable, namely through meeting his future wife, manager, and co-conspirator, Gala Diakonova . Already married to Paul Éluard, a poet and co-founder of the Surrealist movement which gave Dali his signature flair, Gala was everything Dali was not. Confident in her body and sexually accomplished, a passionate affair soon arose between the two, and Gala’s marriage to Paul ended shortly thereafter. Womp womp!

The nature of their physical relationship remains an issue of discussion- for perverts. Dali was known to say that Gala was the only woman he made proper love to throughout his entire life. Maybe a lifelong predilection with Catholicism prevented an exploration of his natural instincts; either way, neither of them were content with a vanilla sex life.

They were both unfaithful to each other, in an oddly inclusive sort of way. He would watch her with other lovers, pleasuring himself. Other times, Dali would indulge in dalliances with his models and hangers-on, by pleasuring himself. The circle of admirers they cultivated prized ambiguity and androgyny, seeking a beauty unchained by social expectations of physiology. When it came to choosing dance partners, Gala had her pick of the ball.

Things Get Out of Hand

During the artistic process, Dali would frequently masturbate over his subjects, a habit which would later prove problematic. Gala maintained the occasional tryst, though both were discrete in their indiscretions. Dali joined at least one of his proteges in a “spiritual marriage” on a mountaintop, and Gala managed an affair in her mid 70s to the singer who played Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. Dali, bombastic in his Catholicism, could only have been thrilled.

Dali treated controversy as just another color on his palette. During one of his first public speeches as part of the surrealist group, he insulted the audience and Catalonia as a whole. During a later presentation, he arrived wearing a full diving suit, and almost suffocated. He was only freed when a companion found a wrench outside and detached the helmet. In his defense, Dali claimed he wanted to show he was fully submerged in the subconscious.

Controversy was no stranger to his home life, either. His parents were skeptical of his relationship with Gala, who was 10 years older and abandoned a husband and child to be with him. While his connection to his father had never been particularly stable, Dali found himself excised from the family after producing a painting which was an outline of Jesus, into which were written the words “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait.”

His father never forgave him after that. Despite living within sight of each other, none of Dali’s family ever visited the house he shared with Gala. The loss of his sister was an especially deep wound.

Image and Artist

If it’s not yet clear, Dali is not a reliable authority on the subject of Dali. Being such a keen expert of self-promotion, he used every interview as an opportunity to sell a vision of himself as the artist-genius. For example, he probably never spat on his mother’s portrait for any reason. He denied supporting Hitler even as he included his face in major works. 

He never clearly denounced Fascism, and instead described himself as a monarchist-anarchist. In his system, the king should rule absolutely, under which the people could enjoy the freedom of absolute anarchy. Is that contradictory? Of course. It’s Salvador Dali — why would you expect trenchant political commentary from the madman who glued a lobster to a telephone and sold it for a million dollars?

It’s also exactly the sort of philosophy which would appeal to the debauched ultra-rich, used to experiencing life as an extended orgy, so expect a revival of Monarchist-Anarchism on Goop any day now.

When the other surrealists dragged him before a kangaroo court and accused him of fascist sympathies, he feigned illness and showed up wearing too many sweaters. He would pause his self-defense to take his own temperature, shed layers, don or doff socks, do whatever it took to highlight the farcical nature of these proceedings.

His politics remain a major point of contention for both fans and detractors. Fascism would have interrupted his ability to enjoy himself, so it’s easy to read his comments insincerely. Maybe they were proto-trolling, saying the opposite of what his lefty friends were saying just to get attention. However, later in life, Dali would voice support for General Francisco Franco, the brutal Spanish dictator, calling him “the only intelligent man in politics.” 

When he said this, Franco was busy killing two hundred thousand of his own citizens while imprisoning five hundred thousand more. That’s not even defensible as satire. Pablo Picasso turned his back on Dali and refused to speak of him again. The Surrealists issued a pamphlet denouncing Dali, and he became a persona non grata in the movement.

An epic troll, indeed.

Things Get Weirder

Curiously enough, his most controversial act is one you’re least likely to hear about. As we mentioned, Dali had unconventional sexual practices. Being rich and famous, he had no shortage of willing partners, with one tragically notable exception.

In 1945, Dali was introduced to the model Constance Webb by a mutual acquaintance, and he was instantly charmed. She agreed to model for him, providing inspiration for some figures in the film Spellbound. She described him as a “perfect gentlemen” during their sessions together, slowly coaxing her into working with less and less clothing.

After their final session, however, as she was relaxing with her arm over her eyes, he jumped upon her stomach and ejaculated upon her breasts, which he began licking up. She quit modeling for him immediately afterwards, only divulging the fact of her assault in interviews after the artists’ death.

This wasn’t even his first time crossing that kind of physical line. As a young man, a woman complimented his beautiful feet, so he responded by trampling her and only stopped when his friends pulled him off of her. 

If there was a MeToo movement in the 40s, maybe Dali would be remembered differently. Instead, he’s much more likely to be rebuked for selling out, as if the greatest moral failing of his life were the advertising campaigns for things like leg-ware and lollipops. He was the one who designed the current Chupa Chups logo, and even insisted on displaying the logo at the top of the pop, to ensure that it’s correctly represented.

Salvadore C.K.

The question of separating the art from the artist is ultimately one of measuring exactly how much misery we’re willing to tolerate from creators in exchange for entertainment. The justification being that this sort of abuse is the price of genius, rather than the side effect of privilege. Or maybe we all just want to believe that we can get good enough at something that the laws of society no longer apply. Either way, there’s no better place to be an inscrutable genius than the United States, so off he went!

After moving to America to escape the second World War, Dali found great success in New York, but this proved insufficient to satisfy his hunger for fame. He had his eyes set on Hollywood. Having already made a name for himself in cinema circles with the famous eye-slitting scene from his first movie, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) , it was easy for Dali to meet people who could open doors for him. He was welcomed to California with open arms, eyes, and wallets.

After painting a few portraits for rich well-connected socialites, he was introduced to Alfred Hitchcock, who enlisted Dali’s help for the elaborate dream sequences in the noir thriller Spellbound. Sadly, only two minutes out of twenty made it into the final cut of the film, and the rest of the footage has since been lost to time.

Hitchcock sought out Dali not for the press, but because according to him, no one could better represent the vividness of dreams. Prior to Dali, cinematic dream sequences were misty, vague affairs where themes and motifs were hinted at from behind a layer of plausible deniability.

Sequence designing for Hollywood is quite the step up from instigating arthouse riots in Paris, even if the final project failed to deliver the artist’s full vision . In 1976 Dali would write and direct Impressions of Upper Mongolia, a mockumentary about the search for an enormous psychedelic mushroom.

The climax of the film involves an elaborate flyover of an impossibly colored alien landscape which, upon a slow zoom out, is revealed to be a tarnished brass band on a pen Dali had spent a week peeing on. It is, likely through no small coincidence, the ideal film to watch while on mushrooms.

The Clock Melts Down

The end of Dali’s life was marked by a tragic fleecing . Of the millions he earned in his life, precious little remained of his estate near the end. He was investigated by the American IRS for tax absurdities. His hands started to shake so much he was often unable to perform the exacting strokes he based his work upon.

After Gala’s death, her body was smuggled back to Pubol wrapped in a blanket in the back of a car, and interred in the castle she spent so much of her life in. As his own health started to fail, some opportunists in Dali’s social circle seized the opportunity to pilfer whatever they could. Money went missing. A border in his childhood home walked off with briefcases full of personal papers and sketches, claiming they were to be documented and photographed in Paris. Of course, they were never to be seen again.

Delirious, Dali would sign whatever canvases and lithograph sheets were pressed in his hands, and the market was flooded with forged art. To this day, rumors of newly discovered Dali masterpieces are usually just convincing fakes drawn on a pre-signed sheet. Up to 50,000 such works may have been created, and the bulk still remain at large.

Instead of consigning the works to Spain through his foundation in the Dali Museum, as he declared earlier, Dali signed papers ceding copyright to a corporation owned by a long-time business partner.

Even in death, Dali’s life was marked by irony. His initial plan was to construct a tomb adjacent to Gala’s resting place with a hole between them, such that they could hold hands in the afterlife. Instead, the mayor of Figueres intervened just hours before Dali’s death and claimed that the artist had charged him with moving the final resting place to the Dali Theater and Museum, conveniently giving it a huge tourist attraction.

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Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was one of the most eccentric artists ever. He dubbed a spectacular handle bar mustache, beginning in the 1920’s, and is best known for his achievements in Surrealism Art. He used many methods to reflect his ideas, including paint, charcoal, film, and sculpture, all which were amusing and avant garde in their time.

Born on May 11, 1904, Dalí was told from the beginning that he was a reincarnation of his brother who had died nine months before he was born. His parents told him this often, and he was named after his dead brother. Throughout his life, he often reflected upon this, and he believed it himself. His artistic ambitions were encouraged from a young age, and he attended a drawing school on his youth. In 1919, at the age of 14, Dalí’s dad held an exhibition in their house for him.

In February of 1921, his mom died of breast cancer, and he was deeply hurt. Soon after, Salvador’s dad married his aunt, who was his mom’s sister who had been widowed some years before. Dalí was fine with the marriage, for he loved his aunt and welcomed her to be his new mom.

The next year he attended Academia de San Fernando for four years. Here he learned his technique and skills for all the other mixed medias he was going to use in the future. But, before the final exams were over, Dalí was expelled, for he had proclaimed that no teacher was competent enough to examine him. He left Spain, and went to Paris. There, he met Picasso, who had been his biggest influence up to then. To his surprise, Picasso had already heard of him through another artist, Joan Miró, and that he had spoke favorably of him.

Besides Picasso, Dalí was influenced by Raphael, a Renaissance artist, Vermeer, a Dutch Baroque artist, and Velazquez, a Spanish Baroque artist. His work does not reflect their influence on him too much, but those were the artists he appreciated most.

In 1929, he met Luis Buñuel. Together, they made and produced a movie called Un Chien Andalou . It was 17 minutes long, and it incorporated all the Surrealists ideals. In it, ants come out of a watch, which later he painted in his painting, the Persistence of Memory . It is black and white, and in the beginning of the film, a boy on a bicycle is hit by a car, and ants start coming out from his hand. The film has no plot, and is suppose to make the viewer seem like they are dreaming. On the set of making this short film, he met Gala, a Russian immigrant whom he fell in love with. She was eleven years older than him, and she was married to a Surrealist poet at the time. His father disapproved of her and her connection with the Surrealists.

In 1930, Dalí exhibited in Paris a work with a surrealist exhibit of the “Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.” Underneath the drawing, it said, “sometimes, I spit on my mother’s portrait just for fun.” His father begged him to apologize for the rude comment, and when Dalí refused, his father disinherited him.

The next year, he came out with The Persistence of Memory , which is considered his best work. In the painting, pocket watches melt on braches and counter tops. Another watch has ants spewing out, reminiscent of the movie. On the right, half a face is laying on the ground, which is another image that Dalí uses in several of his paintings. The image is usually interpreted as representing Einstein’s theory on time, since the theory had been written and printed around that time.

In 1934, Dalí finally married Gala, his girlfriend of five years. Since his first exhibit in America was after their wedding, they decided to travel there. They hosted a ball, and dressed up as the kidnapped Lindbergh baby and its kidnapper and were severely criticized for doing so. They were forced to apologize, and left America right afterwards.

Two years later, Dalí met Edward James, who became his new patron. He commissioned several works of art that resembled the Dada era. For instance, the Lobster Telephone . A person would talk into the lobster’s genitals, and listen through the head. Another piece was Mea West Lips Sofa . Dalí had a fascination with her lips, so he made them into a couch.

When World War II began, he and Gala moved to America to avoid the war. They had been living in France at the time, and when the Germans threatened to invade, they got out. Many of the Surrealists were mad at Dalí for leaving. Dalí believed that artists shouldn’t exclaim their views on politics, but the rest accused him of being a Hitler supporter for not having publically declared a side.

He wrote an autobiography while in America, called The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí . He also continued painting, but none of it reached the popularity it had before the war. In 1949, he moved to Catalonia, Spain, which made the other Surrealists even more infuriated, because it was under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco , and he still hadn’t chosen a side. He was soon expelled from the group.

In 1960, he built the Dalí Theater and Museum in Figures, Spain, where he had been born. He and Gala lived above it, and held auditions for the stage actors. But in 1980, Dalí’s health deteriorated. Gala had been giving him some medicine that wasn’t prescribed by his doctor, and it ruined his nervous system, leaving him with Parkinson’s like symptoms which prevented him from painting.

In 1982, Franco was out of power, and a King was on the throne again. King Juan Carlos gave Dalí the title of Marqués de Dalí de Púbol . The King’s favorite artist was Dalí, and Dalí gave him the last drawing he ever made. Gala died later that year, and he was deeply depressed. Dalí lost all will to live, and attempted suicide by dehydrating himself. He was moved to his castle in Púbol, which he had built for Gala, and a fire started in his room. He was rescued, but it was always believed to have been started by Dalí as another attempt at suicide. In November 1988, Dalí was taken to the hospital for heart failure. He suffered there for three months, and on January 23, 1989, Dalí died, with King Juan Carlos by his side.

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Salvador Dali Biography

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Follow the path to stardom of Spanish artist Savador Dali in this extensive biography that draws together the most significant works from his long and distinguished career.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born on the 11 May 1904 in Figueres, Spain and even from a very young age, he was destined to become one of the most prolific artists of all time. The striking and somewhat bizarre images depicted in his paintings solidified his name in the Surrealist movement and his artwork is still revered by many acclaimed art critics to this day. His ambitious nature ensured that his finely honed technical skills would be extended into a vast number of mediums, as he successfully produced an array of sculptures , drawings, jewellery and furniture. There were even a number of films that he produced in collaboration with experts in that field. One can draw an obvious comparison with the Renaissance masters who also took on a number of different disciplines and were somehow able to impress within each and every one of them.

The Early Years

Dali spent his childhood between Figueres and the family summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques, both of which were to feature prominently in his artwork. His brother, who died nine months before Dali was born from gastroenteritis and also named Salvador, also featured in his paintings. Dali claimed that when he was five years old, his parents took him to his brother's grave and told him that he was the reincarnation of his brother. His parents encouraged his talent and even built him his first art studio in Cadaques where he spent a great deal of time producing impressive charcoal drawings . He attended the Colegie de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, where his reputation as a daydreamer and an eccentric began. In 1919, his first art exhibition was held in the Municipal Theatre of Figueres.

Dali and Surrealism

Following the death of his mother to breast cancer in 1921, he attended the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid where he was heavily influenced by several different artistic movements such as metaphysics and cubism. It wasn't long before his talent as an artist and his flamboyant, eccentric ways gained a great deal of attention. After being expelled from school for being disruptive and egotistical, Dali took several trips to Paris where he met renowned intellectuals and painters such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro , the latter of whom introduced him to the Surrealist movement. From 1929 onwards, Dali produced many surrealist paintings that are often described as collages of his dreams and subconscious thoughts. He also collaborated with Surrealist film director Luis Brunel in making two short films.

Dali officially joined the Surrealist Group and by 1930 he was considered to be a notorious figure in the Surrealist movement. His most famous painting, arguably the most famous of all surrealist paintings, The Persistence of Memory , was completed in 1931. This world-renowned painting, often called The Soft Watches or The Melting Clocks , was a clear example of Dali's unique talent as an artist. The artist would collaborate regularly with other members of the Surrealist movement but their opinions would regularly clash, both on artistic matters but also around political views. This led to other members starting to distrust Dali and he slowly became more and more sidelined. He was not someone who could tailor his opinions or discipline himself to avoid these confrontations and perhaps secretly even enjoyed causing controversy, just as he would right across the rest of his life, from when he was a child and excluded from school to his latter years as an artist.

Gala and the Classical Movement

Despite meeting in 1929, it wasn't until 1934 that Dali married his muse and inspiration, Elena Ivanorna Diakonova, also known as Gala. A Russian immigrant who was ten years his senior, Gala took care of the business side of things, including all legal and financial matters and she featured prominently in not only his life, but also his artistry. As well as his talent for painting, he was recognised as being eccentric; wearing odd clothing and sporting a flamboyant moustache influenced by one of his heroes, the Spanish master painter Diego Velazquez . In the mid-1930s, he famously showed up to a ball held in his honour wearing a glass case across his chest containing a brassiere.

His controversial behaviour started to overshadow his magnificent talent as an artist and the critics became more concerned with his acts of non-conformity than his artwork. In 1934, a 'trial' was held and Dali was expelled from the Surrealist group. Several theories suggest that this was mainly due to his disruptive nature and some hint that his apolitical views were greatly frowned upon. Despite his expulsion, he continued to produce highly rated Surrealist paintings such as Swans Reflecting Elephants and Metamorphosis of Narcissus , both of which were completed in 1937. He participated in Surrealist art exhibitions into the 1940s.

Dali's classical movement came between 1942 and 1948. Throughout this period, Dali and Gala were living in the US. While World War II enveloped Europe, Dali continued to produce breath-taking pieces of art and in 1941, he had his own exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. His autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, was published in 1942 and is still seen as the key publication on his life, up to that point. It was an honest portrayal of the extraordinary world in which he lived and much of the detail merely confirmed what many already believed about him. There has been a huge amount said by a variety of sources over the years regarding Dali, and it is very helpful to have this authorised account of his life with which to compare these other, unconfirmed opinions.

The Final Years

After returning home in 1948 with his wife, Dali spent the next fifteen years creating 19 large canvasses that incorporated optical illusions, geometry and Surrealist images. The most famous of these paintings were The Hallucinogenic Toreador and The Sacrament of the Last Supper . Between 1960 and 1974, Dali helped to build the Teatro-Museo in Figueres, where many of his paintings can still be seen today. In 1980 he retired from painting due to a motor disorder that prevented him from working and in 1982, his beloved Gala died. Confined to a wheelchair following a house fire, Dali lived out his last few years in relative seclusion. Physical disabilities have challenged even the greatest artists, remembering how Matisse worked on his cutouts in his later years, and Dali would continue to do whatever he could as his health slowly deteriorated in the 1980s.

Having had a pacemaker fitted in 1986, Dali could not shake off his heart problems and was hospitalised again in 1988. Whilst there he was visited by King Juan Carlos, a friend and follower of the artist. He would eventually die in 1989 of heart failure and respiratory problems. In a fitting gesture, he remains buried in the crypt below his Theatre-Museum in Figueres and continues to attract followers to the site even today. After his international impact over so many years, it is charming to find him now lying just a few hundred metres from his original family home, as well as just across the road from where he received his baptism and first communion. A plaque remains alongside his burial spot and the theatre lives on in his name and legacy.