salvador dali biography in spanish

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Later career

What was Salvador Dalí’s early life like?

Where did salvador dalí get his education, what is salvador dalí best known for.

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Salvador Dalí

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Salvador Dalí was the son of Salvador Dalí Cusí, a notary, and Felipa Domènech Ferrés. His family lived in Figueras, Catalonia , Spain , but spent summers in the seaside community of Cadaqués, where Dalí drew and painted the coastal landscape and his family. There he also studied painting with Ramón Pichot, a family friend.

Salvador Dalí began his formal education at a public school in Figueras, Catalonia , Spain , but, because of the boy’s daydreaming, his father switched him to a private school where instruction was in French. Later he studied at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid , where he befriended Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel .

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches. Dalí also collaborated with director Luis Buñuel on the Surrealistic films Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog ) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age ).

Salvador Dalí (born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain—died January 23, 1989, Figueras) was a Spanish artist and filmmaker, who was part of the Surrealist group in his early career and continued to build on the movement’s ideas and imagery throughout his life. His eccentric behavior and his eerie paintings made him the best known of the group .

Dalí was born in Figueras, Spain , a town in the Catalonia region. He was the son of Salvador Dalí Cusí, a notary, atheist, and Republican who supported Catalonia’s independence from Spain, and Felipa Domènech Ferrés, a Roman Catholic, who indulged her son’s quirky behavior. Salvador Dalí was their second son, the first had died nine months prior and had also been named Salvador. A younger sister, Ana María, was born in 1908. Salvador Dalí spoke Catalan at home but also learned Spanish and French. His mostly happy childhood and adolescence came to an end with the death of his mother of breast cancer in 1921. Soon after Dalí enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.

As an art student in Madrid , Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud ’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “ paranoiac critical.”

Once Dalí hit on that method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings which made him the best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dreamworld in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed , deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion . Dalí portrayed those objects in meticulous , almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of those enigmatic images is The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which limp melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape.

With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel , Dalí made two Surrealistic films — Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog ) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age )—that are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images. During the presentation of the first film , Dalí met French poet Paul Éluard , one of the founders of Surrealism , and his wife, Gala. She married Dalí in 1934 and became his manager, model, and muse.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more-academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael . His ambivalent political views during the rise of fascism alienated his Surrealist colleagues, and he was eventually expelled from the group. Thereafter, he spent much of his time designing theater sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States , where he lived from 1940 to 1955.

In the period from 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centering on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, those later paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist’s earlier works.

“Modesty is not exactly my specialty.”

The most interesting and revealing of Dalí’s books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). In addition to his art and writing , Dalí also created a monument to himself, the Dalí Theatre-Museum, in his hometown of Figueras, which opened in 1974 and features art from his collection. The museum was designed by the artist and constructed on the remains of the local theater building, which was destroyed in a fire during the Spanish Civil War . It was also where Dalí had shown some of his earliest art pieces. Dalí was buried under the stage after his death in 1989.

Another museum dedicated to the Surrealist was founded by collectors by A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse in 1982 and is located in St. Petersburg , Florida .

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

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

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!

• Salvador Dalí
• Spanish Culture
• Spanish Art History

SALVADOR DALÍ PAINTINGS

• The Great Masturbator (1929)
• The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of the Civil War) (1936)
• Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)
• The Elephants (1948)
• The Last Supper (1955)
• Rhinoceros Dressed in Lace (1956)

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion? You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

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.

Theo is an intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.

Salvador Dalí

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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 in Catalonia, 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. 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, sculpture, film, graphic arts, animation, fashion, 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, popular culture, 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 .

King of Aragon

Forgotten horizon, autumnal cannibalism, mountain lake, metamorphosis of narcissus, lobster telephone, artist as subject, der speigel magazine wrapped, film and audio.

Dali & Film

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Surrealism

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Biography of Salvador Dalí, Surrealist Artist

A Life as Strange as His Paintings

• Art History
• Architecture

• 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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Who Was Salvador Dalí and Why Was He So Important?

By Howard Halle

Howard Halle

Hear the word Surrealism and Salvador Dalí will most likely spring to mind—if not the artist himself, then certainly his signature icon of a melting watch. Known for his theatrical behavior and appearance (especially his cartoonishly waxed mustache) and for paintings (frenzied swirls of delirious, if not demented, subject matter) and found-object sculptures (e.g., Lobster Telephone , 1938, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace), Dalí became synonymous with Surrealism, much to the consternation of the movement’s founder, André Breton, who came to resent Dalí’s success.

Dalí’s legacy rested as much on the precedent he set for the artist as superstar brand (anticipating Warhol and Koons) as it did on his work. He also embodied the deleterious effects of such celebrity, becoming a caricature of himself whose antics and tendency to dump too much product into the market wound up diluting his art. More troubling was his flirtation with fascism during the 1930s, which cost him his place in the Surrealist circle.

Dalí was born in 1904 in the Catalan town of Figueres, Spain. His father, a lawyer, was a strict disciplinarian with anticlerical leanings who supported autonomy for Catalonia; his mother, meanwhile, encouraged Dalí’s artistic ambitions.

He was the second child called Salvador: Nine months before his birth, an older brother with the same name died at age three. When Dalí turned five, his parents told him that he was a reincarnation of his sibling, which haunted his life and art until his dying day. “I thought I was dead before I knew I was alive,” Dalí said of the specter hanging over him. In 1963 he painted Portrait of My Dead Brother a Pop Art-like exorcism in which he imagined his namesake as an adult, rendered in benday dots.

Dalí also knew that his surname wasn’t Spanish or Catalan, but native to North Africa, suggesting a connection to the Moors who conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. This was enough for Dalí to claim Arab lineage, which he said accounted for his love of ornamentation and his skin turning unusually dark when tan.

Education and Early Career

In 1916 Dalí began his studies at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueres. He became acquainted with the avant-garde through the Catalan Impressionist Ramon Pichot, who regularly visited Paris. Pichot introduced the young Dalí to the work of Picasso and the Futurists, both of which would influence Dalí’s oeuvre even as it maintained a strong attachment to realism.

In 1921, Dalí’s mother died, dealing him a deep blow. The following year, at age 17, he entered Madrid’s San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Spain’s preeminent art school.

Initially Dalí’s focused on landscapes and portraits, but soon enough his art became characterized by willful weirdness. In his Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael (circa 1921), he melded Fauvist colorism with Mannerist distortion, portraying himself in three-quarters profile with a towering, torquing neck straight out of a Parmigianino Madonna.

Dalí could paint with near-photorealistic precision, a skill that undoubtedly factored into his work’s public acceptance. But even his most prosaic efforts could seem oddly estranged from the everyday, as in Girl’s Back (1926), whose turned-away pose put her at an enigmatic remove from onlookers.

Sigmund Freud was perhaps the greatest early influence on Dalí, who initially immersed himself in Freud’s theories of the id while still in school. He applied Freud’s thinking to his own, using it to channel his fears, desires, and neuroses through his art. He tried to meet the famed psychoanalyst several times, traveling to call upon him at his Viennese residence to no avail. In 1938, Dalí finally managed to visit Freud, in London, where he lived after fleeing the Nazi anschluss of Austria.

Dalí and the Surrealist Circle

Dalí also read Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, which laid out the concept of automatism, calling for writing or making art without conscious thought or intention. In 1926 he moved to Paris, his reputation preceding his arrival thanks to fellow Catalan Joan Miró, whose own biomorphic compositions had inspired the younger artist. Miró, who’d joined the Surrealist movement at its inception, introduced Dalí to Breton and Picasso, as well as to his own gallery dealer.

Dalí’s first Surrealist painting, Apparatus and Hand (1927), depicts a bizarre figure comprising an elongated pyramid precariously perched atop another geometric solid with needle-thin legs; it stands on a barren plain beneath a turbulent vortex of clouds and sky lofting objects (a nude female torso, a flock of birds) into the air. Whatever its meaning, Dalí maintained that this vision sprang from the deepest recesses of his subconscious.

Dalí quickly assimilated others’ ideas, especially those of Yves Tanguy; according to Dalí biographer Ian Gibson, the artist allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.” Dalí soon eclipsed Tanguy and other Surrealists in the public eye—which, as previously mentioned, got under Breton’s skin, though it would take a nearly a decade for things to finally come to a head between them.

Dalí and Luis Buñuel

In April 1929, Dalí collaborated with the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel—whom Dalí met while both were students in Madrid—on a short film financed by Buñuel’s mother: Un Chien Andalou . With its shocking sequence of a razor slashing a woman’s eyeball, the film became an immediate succès de scandale and was eventually recognized as a cinematic landmark thanks to its disjointed mis en scene, and free-associative montage of provocative imagery. A year later, the two went on to make L’Age d’Or , an in-your-face, satirical takedown of bourgeois sexual hypocrisy featuring interludes like one of a couple publicly fornicating in the mud, which fomented a right-wing riot during an early screening.

Dalí and Gala

In August 1929, Dalí received a visit from Paul Éluard, the cofounder of Surrealism, and his wife Gala, née Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. Ten years Dalí’s senior, Gala cast a spell on him, and they soon began an affair. (Her marriage to Éluard had previously involved a ménage à trois with the German artist Max Ernst). The two eventually married, and Gala became Dalí’s lifelong companion, model, and muse. However, Gala insisted on an open relationship—at least for her, since Dalí was reportedly more interested in masturbation than reciprocal sex.

The Surrealist Object

Drama aside, Dalí did make important contributions to Surrealist ideology. When artists began flocking to the movement, Breton commissioned Dalí to come up with a motif that could span their diversity of styles and ideologies. In response, Dalí offered “Surrealist objects” as a unifying concept. Dalí’s proposal was essentially a psychosexual spin on the found-object aesthetic seen most conspicuously in Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with individual body parts.

Dalí’s own Surrealist objects, like Lobster Telephone , manifested his obsessions in physical form. Another piece, Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically (1931/1973), incorporated a single red pump juxtaposed with items such as glass of milk, a knot of pubic hair glued to a sugar cube, a pornographic photo, and a wooden armature resembling a weighing scale; Dalí called it a “mechanism” for onanistic fantasies.

The Paranoiac-Critical Method

Concurrently, Dalí developed his “paranoiac-critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream of consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”

Prime illustrations of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical approach include his masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory (1931), as well as Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938), both set along a shore fronting a bay. The former, a rumination on the relative nature of time, introduced what would become Dalí’s most enduring symbol: A pocket watch softened as if left in the sun for too long. By his own telling, the notion came to him in a reverie over a plate of overripe Camembert cheese. Apparition , meanwhile, centers on the doubled image of a footed bowl of pears, with its stem resolving into a ghostly face.

Fame and Fortune

Dalí avidly pursued money and notoriety at a time when the avant-garde considered such goals a betrayal of art. He was shameless self-promoter who admitted to having a “pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.” His first show in Paris at the Goemans Gallery in November 1929 was a commercial smash, though it left critics scratching their heads. His first visit to New York, in 1934, created a media firestorm, which he encouraged by spouting edgy statements like “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” Before departing New York, he was feted with a costume ball thrown by Caresse Crosby, a Bostonian blueblood who also invented the brassiere. Dalí attended wearing a bra contained in a glass case strapped to his chest; Gala accompanied him dressed as a woman giving birth through her head.

Other stunts included a talk in London that Dalí delivered in a deep-sea diver’s suit, which almost asphyxiated him. For a lecture in Paris, he arrived in a Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflower. Such antics garnered him huge amounts of press, including an appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1936.

Expulsion from Surrealism

Dalí’s politics leaned right, though it was never established that he was a full-blown fascist. He did support Franco during the Spanish Civil War and was also infatuated with Hitler, saying that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me.” The central figure of a wet nurse on a beach in Dalí’s The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (1934) originally sported a Nazi armband until Breton prevailed on Dalí to paint it out. In 1939 Dalí created The Enigma of Hitler , which featured a giant telephone receiver dripping viscous fluid onto a dish containing a tiny photo of the dictator. Dalí was also friends with Nazi sympathizer Wallis Simpson, the woman Edward VIII had abdicated his throne to marry.

Nevertheless, Dalí insisted, “I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention,” though that didn’t prevent Breton from seeking to banish Dalí from the Surrealist movement by putting him “on trial” in 1934 as a fascist. He barely escaped conviction, quipping in the end that “the difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist.”

Still, his support of Franco cost him friendships with Buñuel and others, and thanks to the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Breton finally engineered Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, accusing him of espousing race war. Breton also denounced the paranoiac-critical method, even though he’d originally hailed it as an “instrument of primary importance.”

Later Career

Breton was as motivated by his jealousy of Dalí’s stardom as he was by the artist’s political incorrectness, an animus abundantly evident in the anagram he coined from Dalí’s name: Avida Dollars (“greedy for dollars”). Breton remained a nemesis for decades, going so far as to lobby for Dalí’s exclusion from a 1960 show organized by Marcel Duchamp in New York. (The attempt failed.) Dalí’s renown, however, continued to grow as he became more of a pop-cultural phenomenon than an artist.

The same year he was ousted from the Surrealists, Dalí designed The Dream of Venus for the New York World’s Fair,  a sort of funhouse dedicated to the goddess of love that surpassed anything at Coney Island. He also became a presence in Hollywood, designing dream sequences for the noir romance Moon Tide (1942) and Alfred Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller, Spellbound (1945), though both suffered cuts demanded by studio executives. In 1946 Dalí collaborated with Disney animator John Hench on a short called Destino , which never went beyond storyboarding and test footage. A version of sorts was completed in 2003, well after the artist’s death.

In 1948, Dalí appeared in a famed Life magazine spread, featuring a high-speed camera shot of the artist levitating in a studio complete with floating easel, step stool, and chair, along with a thrown bucketful of water and a trio of cats frozen in midair. The photo took 26 tries to complete.

Dalí licensed his name to a line of perfumes for Sears, which also sold framed reproductions of his work. Other commercial forays included appearances in TV ads for Lanvin chocolate, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff Airlines, in which Dalí could be seen discussing the finer points of pitching with New York Yankee hall-of-famer Whitey Ford.

Dalí didn’t do anything that Warhol wouldn’t do later, though Andy never undermined his art the way Dalí did. In 1976 and 1977, Dalí signed and sold 17,500 blank sheets of paper with his signature, meant for printmaking ventures that never materialized; instead, they were used to create forgeries of his work.

Final Years

While never matching the heights of his early career, Dalí did have flashes of brilliance during his later years, such as the painting, The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968–70). Depicting a succession of Venus de Milos receding across the floor of a Roman arena, it cleverly mirrored the era’s lysergic zeitgeist.

Starting in 1980, Dalí’s health began to fail with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and bouts of depression and drug addiction. When Gala died, in 1982, his condition worsened. He refused to eat, and he barely recovered from third-degree burns suffered during a fire in 1984. Dalí died of cardiac arrest five years later at age 84 in Figureres. He was buried not far from his childhood home, joining a brother whose fate hovered over a fantastical chapter in art history.

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Salvador Dalí

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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.

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                                 BIOGRAPHY

   biography.

SALVADOR  DALÍ

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born in 1904 on the morning of May 11 th  in the small farming village of Figueres in Spain.

His parents bestowed upon him the name of his older brother, Salvador, who had tragically passed away shortly before Dalí’s birth.  Salvador Dalí passed much of his childhood in Figueres and at his family’s summer home in the coastal village of Cadaqués, where his parents built his first studio. From an early age Dalí was encourage to develop his artistic talents, which led to him eventually leaving to study in Madrid at the prestigious San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1920 Dalí travelled to Paris where he met with such artistic contemporaries as Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte and Joao Miró; this contact led to his first Surrealist Period. The painting for which he is best known is undoubtably the “ The Persistence of Memory ”  an oil painting on canvas measuring just 24cm x 33cm depicting soft clocks draped over olive trees a landscape clearly inspired by his native Catalonian countryside. As an adult Dalí and took up residence with  his wife Gala  near Port Lligat. Many of his paintings are inspired by and embody his love for this part of Spain.

Dalí died in Figueres in 1989.

YOUTHFUL YEARS

1904 – born in figueres, spain, on may 11; his first painting, a landscape, bears the date 1910..

1914 – Began high school studies at the Marist Brothers’ school in Figueres, where he began to take an interest in painting and was particularly influenced by Ramon Pixtox (1872-1925). For the most part, Dalí’s early works consist of landscapes and genre scenes depicting peasants and fishermen.

1921 – Dalí enrolled at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid; here he met Lorca, Buñel and Montes and was influenced by the Italian Futurists, Bonnard and Eugène Carrière.

1922 – Exhibits at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona. In Paris André Breton , together with Picasso, Max Ernst and Man Ray , founded the first Surrealist group .

1923 – Arrested for anarchist tendencies and held in jail for 35 days; developed interest in Cubism and the Italian metaphysical school (Carrà and de Chirico).

1925 – First solo exhibition in Barcelona; both Picasso and Miró show interest in his art; Dalí begins to collaborate with the Barcelona magazine “L’Amis de les Arts,” a relationship that will last until 1929.

1926 – Dalí visits Paris (where he meets Picasso) and Brussels; he is expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts; Miró visits Dalí in Cadaqués ; second solo exhibition at Galeries Dalmau; interest from critics and public grows.

1927 – Dalí performs military service; spends the summer in the company of Lorca and Regino Sàinz de la Maza; writes the poem “San Sebastian,” which is published in “L’Amis de les Arts .”

1928 – Lluis Montanyà, Sevastià Gasch and Dalí publish the revolutionary Yellow Manifesto; his work is influenced by Miró, Arp, Ernst and Tanguy. Three of his paintings are exhibited at the 27th Carnegie Institute Painting Exhibition, Pittsburgh, United States.

1929 – Dalí is in Paris to work on Buñuel’s film. Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which causes a sensation; Miró presents Dalí at the Surrealist Group where he met Magritte, Paul Eluard and Helena, who would later become his wife Gala ; Dalí’s first exhibition, presented by Breton, was held at Galerie Goemans in Paris.

1930 – “Le Surréalism au Service de la Révolution.” public Reverie , one of Dalí’s most important texts; ten of Dalí’s works are exhibited in what must be considered the first Surrealist exhibition in the United States; Dalí publishes the text L’Ane Pourri in which he lays the foundations of his paranoid-critical method.

1931 – First of three exhibitions held over the next three years at Galerie Pierre Colle.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY AND NEW YORK

1931 – the persistence of memory arouses enormous curiosity among new york art gallery goers in a group exhibition at the julien levy gallery in new york..

1933 – Dalí signs a contract with Albert Skira, committing to create forty drawings for Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror; first solo exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York; in December Dalí exhibits at Galeria d’Art Catalònia in Barcelona.

1934 – Exhibits at the Salon des Indépendants Dalí, Julien Levy Gallery, Galerie Jacques Bonjean, Carnegie Institute and ZwemmerGallery in London – his first solo exhibition in Britain; Gala and Dalí travel to New York for the first time; lectures at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.

1936 – The Surrealist Exhibition of objects presented at the Galerie C. Ratton in which Dalí participated marked the “officialization” of a new expression of Surrealism; he returned to N.Y. and his picture appeared on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine; he exhibited again at the Julien Levy Gallery and in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.”

1937 – Dalí’s writings in which he develops the concept of Surrealism continue to be published widely; after Lorca’s assassination in ’36, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí took refuge in Italy where he was influenced by the Renaissance and Baroque art.

1938 – Participates in Surrealist exhibition at Galerie des Beaux Arts, Paris; meets Sigmund Freud in London; collaborates with Coco Chanel on several ballet designs for the Ballets de Monte Carlo.

1939 – New York, exhibition at Levy Gallery; signs a contract with the New York International Exposition to create The Dream of Venus but has disagreements with sponsors about his ideas. Following these disagreements, when he was prevented from putting a fish head on Botticelli’s Venus, he published his “Declaration of the Independence of Imagination and Man’s Right to His Own Insanity” ; Dalí designs the sets for the first paranoid ballet, Bacchanal, which is performed at the Metropolitan Opera House; Gala and Dalí return to Europe and settle in Arcachon; the Spanish Civil War ends with General Franco’s victory.

1940 – With the onset of World War II, Dalí left Europe for Virginia and stayed at Caresse Crosby’s house; he later settled in Pebble Beach, California; Dalí remained in the United States until 1948.

1941 – Dalí is very successful in America; begins a prolific collaboration with photographer Philippe Halsman , which will end with the latter’s death in 1979; Dalí finishes writing My Secret Life , published in 1942; Dalí produced libretto, sets and costumes for the ballet Labyrinth at the Metropolitan Opera House.

1942 – Retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is replicated in eight other American cities.

1943 – Dalí becomes a welcome member of New York society; paints portraits of wealthy Americans for the Knoedler Gallery and makes the famous face of Mae West .

1944 – Theater activities intensified and began working on illustrations for several books.

1945 – The atomic bomb explosion at Hiroshima inspires Dalí to begin his “nuclear” or “atomic” period; he works with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence of “Spellbound (I Will Save You).”

1947 – Dalí illustrates an edition of Montaigne’s Essays and has a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and later at the Bignou Gallery in New York.

1948 – Leaves for Europe to settle permanently in Portlligat ; exhibits at the Galleria l’Obelisco in Rome; enters a new phase, in which he no longer has points of contact with the postwar avant-garde but, on the contrary, focuses on the great themes of the Western tradition.

1949-Designs sets for Strauss’s Salome at Covent Garden, London; grows his interest in harmonic and geometric theory; returns to New York.

1950 – Dalí gives the book “Memorandum” to prints in response to his sister’s book; designs sets and costumes for Don Juan Tenorio Zorrilla at the Teatro Maria Guerrero in Madrid; many of his designs from this period are influenced by religion and mythology.

1952 – Dalí explains the elements of nuclear mysticism on a tour that touches seven cities in the United States; he is commissioned to illustrate The Divine Comedy to mark Dante’s anniversary, for which he does 102 watercolors.

1954 – Major retrospective of Dalí’s work in Rome (Palazzo Pallavicini) and later in Venice and Milan.

1958 – Begins ‘optical art,’ researching optical effects and illusions; Gala and Dalí marry in the ‘Chapel of the Angels’ in Spain; Dalí is awarded the Médaille à la Qualité Francaise by the Cuban Ambassador to Paris for his series of illustrations of Don Quixote (1957).

1959 – Dalí meets Pope John XXIII.

1960 – Surrealists write the article We don’t hear it that way against Dalí’s participation in an international exhibition on Surrealism in New York; begins work on “The World of Salvador Dalí” with Robert Descharnes .

1962 – Dalí concentrates more and more on the main themes of his past career, which he continually reexamines and reworks; Descharnes publishes Dalí de Gala .

1963 – Exhibition of most recent works at Knoedler Gallery, New York; publication of Millet’s The Tragic Myth of the Angelus , written in 1933.

1964 – Dalí is awarded the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic; publication of Diary of a Genius ; major retrospective in Tokyo, Japan, organized by Mainichi newspaper.

1965 – New York’s Gallery of Modern Art exhibits never-before-seen paintings from Reynolds Morse’s private collection; Dalí illustrates the Bible with 100 watercolors; develops an interest in holography and three-dimensional art.

1968 – Publication of Les Passions Selon Dalí and Dalí de Draeger.

1969 – Publication of Las Metamorfosis Eròticas, one of the pinnacles of his paranoid-critical method; exhibition at Knoedler Gallery arouses great interest in the American press; Dalí announces the creation of the Dalí Museum in Figueres; he works on commercial posters for the Perrier, Lanvin chocolate and French Railways companies; the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rottedam organizes the first of the major retrospectives in Europe.

1971 – Official opening of the Dalí Museum in Cleveland, consisting largely of the Morse Collection.

1973 – Dalí’s “Holographic Room” is put on display; Dalí illustrates Dix Recettes D’Immortalité and Roi Je t’attends à Babylone.

1974 – Retrospective at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt; opening of the Dalí Theater-Museum.

1978 – New York’s Guggenheim Museum presents Dalí’s first hyper-stereoscopic works; Dalí is named a foreign associate member of the Académie Francaise des Beaux-Arts.

1980 – Major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London; Dalí delivers a portrait of the King of Spain to the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid.

1981 – Dalí slowly recovers from an illness contracted in New York; concerned about his health, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain visit Dalí at his home in Portlligat .

1982 – Attends the official opening of the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, founded by Morse; the Honorable Jordi Pujol, President of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia awards Dalí with the government’s gold medal; Gala, Dalí’s wife, dies June 10 after more than fifty years together and is buried at Púbol Castle; Dalí paints his last paintings; after his wife’s death, Dalí abandons public life and isolates himself in his Púbol Castle.

1989 – Death of Dalí: Salvador Dalí dies at the age of 85 on Jan. 23.

SALVADOR DALÍ AND GALA

“I love her more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso, and even more than money.” Salvador Dalí – 1965 – Diary of a Genius

Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, nicknamed Gala, first met Dalí in 1929 during a trip to Cadaqués with his family, the artist Renee Magritte and his wife.

Despite an age difference of ten years, the romance between Dalí and Gala took hold quickly. She followed him to Paris and began to influence and be part of the Surrealist movement and married Dalí in 1934 . Gala became the muse of Dalí, who cultivated an obsession with her, and represented in many Of his works.

Indeed, in her autobiography, “My Secret Life,” she points out: “ She was destined to be my Gradiva, she who advances, my Victory, my Woman ”.

Gala held the position of Dalí’s manager and agent and procurer of artistic contracts. He was in charge of of accounts and dealt with galleries and merchants. She encouraged him to paint and had enormous influence on his artistic production.

After Gala’s death on June 10, 1982, Dalí retired from public life.

Gala, her real name being  Elena Ivanovna Diakonova was Russian, born in Kazan in 1894 . A secretive and intuitive woman, not afraid of controversy, she spent her childhood in Moscow and attended university courses at a finishing school in St Petersburg. The daughter of Ivan and Antonine Diakonoff, she had two older brothers and a younger sister. Her father died when she was eleven, her mother remarried a lawyer who was able to provide Gala with the means to a good education. She studied at the Brukhonenko academy and gained high marks, becoming qualified to teach in schools. However she suffered worsening tuberculosis / consumption and in 1912 she was sent to Clavadel sanitorium in Switzerland, an institution which treated patients for the disease which was widespread during the nineteenth century.

It was here that  she met and fell in love with the young Paul Eluard , he was 18, she was 19. Their mutual love of literature and culture bought them together; they were both discharged 1914.

Her health back on track, Gala is now officially engaged to Eluard. In 1916 her parents allow her to join Eluard in Paris. Following Eluard’s enlistment during World War I,  they marry in 1917 .  The following year their daughter Cecile is born, Gala’s only child.  Eluard had already started making inroads as a poet, and was involved with the Surrealist movement in France, predominantly with André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon. Gala was a regular attendee of this auspicious circle of intellectuals.

Around 1922 Gala began a love affair with Max Ernst , indeed, Ernst lived with the Eluard’s for a time in their villa in Eaubonne, north of Paris, in a kind of ménage-à-trois.

Gala first met Dalí in 1929 during a trip to Cadaques with her family and the artist Magritte and his wife. The Belgian poet and gallery owner Camille Goemans, introduced Dalí to Eluard in Paris. Despite the ten year age gap, the love affair between Dalí and Gala quickly develops.

She follows him to Paris and begins to influence and be part of the Surrealist movement. So powerful and all-consuming was the affair, Gala effectively abandoned her own daughter when she was eleven years old. Cecile went to live with her paternal grandmother in Paris. In a 2014 interview, Cecile says of her mother, ‘ After she met Dalí she was not interested in me anymore. She was never very warm (..) she was very mysterious, very secretive. I never got to meet my Russian family. I didn’t even know when exactly she was born ’.

Gala married Dalí in 1934 in a civil ceremony; initially the union was rejected by Dalí’s father who did not approve of a Russian divorcee as his sons’ suitor. Gala was Dalí’s muse, he was obsessed with her, she features in many of his artworks. In fact he remarks in his autobiography ‘ My Secret Life’,’ She was destined to become my Gradiva, the one who moves forward, my victory, my wife ’.

During 1937 Gala assumes more power in the position of Dalí’s business manager and agent and procurer of artistic contracts. She manages the accounts and negotiates with galleries and dealers. She encourages him to paint and has a huge influence over his artistic output.

They travelled widely in the United States during the eight years spent there in exile, with winters spent conducting business at the St Regis Hotel in New York, summers in California.

In 1948 the pair returned to Europe. Upon returning to Spain, Ana Maria, Dalí’s sister had an acrimonious reunion with her brother and his wife. She believed Gala had denounced her to the authorities during the Spanish Civil war, and she scorns her for stealing her brother affection.

From this date they would spend summers in Spain in Port Lligat and winters in New York or Paris.

Gala was a ‘model’ for Dalí, and on numerous occasions appears in his art, perhaps the most pertinent being the stunning and provocative oil on canvas, ‘Portrait of Galarina’ (1945).The work takes over a year to complete.

Seemingly during the early 1950s, there is some discord between them, Gala takes on a series of younger lovers, her sex drive was reportedly much higher than his, and she indulges her passions whilst he works in his studio.

Despite this, in 1958 they marry in a catholic ceremony at Capela de la Mare de Deu dels Angels in Girona, Spain.

During the 1960s, Gala begins to age, now well into her sixties, she hands over some control of Dalí’s artistic output to his various secretaries.

In 1968 Gala received a medieval castle in Pubol as a gift from Dalí. Ironically Dalí needed her written permission in order to visit Gala in the castle. Between 1971 and the early 1980’s, Gala would spend her summers at the castle; she regards the castle as a retreat and spends ever increasing periods of time here.

According to some reports, in 1973 at the age of eighty, she has an affair with Jeff Fenholt (fifty years her junior) the American singer and actor. Gala died June 10th 1982, two years prior Dalí , following her worsening senile dementia, and rib and pelvis fractures. She is buried in the crypt of the castle of Pubol , which is now a visitor attraction and forms part of the estate owned and managed by the Gala Salvador Dalí Foundation.

After Gala died, Dalí retreated from public life. Interestingly in early 1982 when he realized Gala was deteriorating, he asked for the construction of two tombs with a little opening between the two, so they could hold hands beyond death.

Dalí says in his book ‘Diary of a Genius’, ‘I love her more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso, and even more than money’ .

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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.

• 1990s + Beyond

Salvador Dali Biography

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras, Catalonia, in 1904. He was both artistic and eccentric from an early age. He later claimed that the death of his older brother, also called Salvador, nine months before he was born, contributed to his intense desire for attention and bizarre behaviour. Dalí began studying at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1921 but was expelled 3 years later for rebellious behaviour. This included refusing to take an examination because he felt that the teachers were not qualified to judge his work. However, his talent had already earned him a successful one-man show at the Galeria Dalmau in Barcelona.

Dalí experimented with various styles but settled on Surrealism. He made the first Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, in 1929. During the next few years Dalí painted some of his most famous pictures. The Persistence of Memory, from 1931, is on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works were filled with bizarre double images and he used a detailed, realistic technique to create imaginative scenes that he called his ‘hand-painted dream photographs’. In 1936 he attended the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and gave a lecture dressed in a diver’s suit. This was just one of his publicity stunts.

In 1939 Dalí quarrelled with the founding father of Surrealism, Breton, and was officially expelled from the movement. However he had already begun to produce more naturalistic pieces due to the Renaissance art that he saw on his numerous visits to Italy. He left Europe when war broke out and lived in America until 1948. During this time he produced numerous paintings and the first of his colourful autobiographies, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. He also became involved in design work including a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film, Spellbound.

Dalí’s later paintings included strongly sexual pieces featuring his wife and also religious works. Of these, the Christ of St John of the Cross is on display in the St Mungo Museum, Glasgow. It was bought by Glasgow City Art Gallery in 1952 and was highly controversial because of its excessively high price. Other religious works include Crucifixion which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Sacrament of the Last Supper that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Dalí produced the second of his autobiographical works, entitled Diary of a Genius, in 1964. However, towards the end of his life Dalí became a recluse. He died in 1989. Two museums are dedicated to his work. The Teatre-Museu Dalí was established in Figueras, Spain in 1974 , and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, was established in 1982.

Throughout his life Dalí was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, film-maker, and writer. He was also one of the leading figures in Surrealism. However, it was none of these but it was actually his enormous talent for self-publicity that made him an international celebrity.

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Salvador Dalí

1904, Figueres, Spain 1989, Figueres, Spain

Salvador Dalí is as memorable for his eccentric, theatrical persona as for his innovative paintings.

A native of Catalonia, in the late 1920s Dalí joined the Parisian circle of Surrealist writers and artists, but was later expelled for political differences. He did, however, share their interest in artistically mining the unconscious, as theorized by Freudian psychoanalysis.

Dalí's meticulously crafted canvases sought to transcribe dreams and half-remembered childhood traumas. Frank but ambiguous sexual imagery is placed in the dusty Spanish landscape and often juxtaposed with figures from Old Master paintings and the mass media.

After a stint in the U.S., Dalí returned to Spain and lived there from 1949 until his death. His later works include experiments in film, holograms, and commercial graphic design, as well as devout but nontraditional Catholic imagery.

Works in the Collection

• Salvador Dalí Les désirs inassouvis (Unsatisfied Desires) 1928

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