salvador dali brief biography

Salvador Dalí

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

(1904-1989)

Who Was Salvador Dalí?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art School and Surrealism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expulsion from the Surrealists

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

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

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

The Dalí Theatre-Museum

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

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

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

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

Final Years

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

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

Paternity Case and New Exhibition

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

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

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

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QUICK FACTS

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

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CITATION INFORMATION

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

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Summary of Salvador Dalí

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

Accomplishments

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

The Life of Salvador Dalí

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

Important Art by Salvador Dalí

Un Chien Andalou

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

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

Great Masturbator

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

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

The Persistence of Memory

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

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

Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'

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

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

The Enigma of William Tell

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

Oil on canvas

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

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

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lobster Telephone

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

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

The Mae West Brooch

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

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

In Voluptas Mors

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

Gelatin silver print

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

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

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

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

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

Biography of Salvador Dalí

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

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

Early Training

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

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

Mature Period

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dalí and Gala in the US

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

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

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

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

Return to Port Lligat

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

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

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

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

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

Late Period and Death

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

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

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

The Legacy of Salvador Dalí

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

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

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

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

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Salvador Dalí

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

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Art History and Artists

Salvador dali.

• Occupation: Artist, Painter, Sculptor
• Born: May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain
• Died: January 23, 1989 in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain
• Famous works: The Persistence of Memory, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Rose Medidative, The Ghost of Vermeer
• Style/Period: Surrealism , Modern Art

• His full name is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech.
• All of the watches in The Persistence of Memory tell different times.
• He was famous for his long curly mustache.
• He wrote an autobiography called The Secret Life of Salvador Dali . Some of the stories in the book are true, but some are just made up.
• Dali admired scientist Albert Einstein and was especially interested in his Theory of Relativity.
• He once worked on a film with movie director Alfred Hitchcock.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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 is Salvador Dalí?

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí Mountain Lake (1938) Tate

© Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/DACS, London 2024

Salvador Dalí made paintings, sculptures and films about the dreams he had. He painted melting clocks and floating eyes, clouds that look like faces and rocks that look like bodies.

Sounds weird right? Think about what your paintings would look like if you painted your dreams? I bet they would be pretty weird too!

Dalí was involved with surrealism. This was an art movement where painters made dream-like scenes and showed situations that would be bizarre or impossible in real life. Look at this painting above – does the lake look like a fish to you?

This sculpture above is by another famous surrealist artist called René Magritte. I wonder why he has painted a head full of clouds?

Surrealist artists were influenced by a famous psychoanalyst called Sigmund Freud. A psychoanalyst is a doctor who studies the human mind and tries to understand it. Freud believed our mind was divided into two parts: the conscious part and the unconscious part. The conscious mind is what we use to make decisions every day, like whether we walk or ride a bike to school. The unconscious mind is where our memories are stored. Most of the time we are not aware of our unconscious mind, but sometimes the memories stored there get mixed up in our dreams and this is what Dalí tried to paint.

Salvador Dalí Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) Tate

Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueres, Spain which is near the Pyrenees Mountains. Surrounded by this landscape as he was growing up, Dalí often included the scenery he saw as a boy in his paintings.

Look at the painting above. Can you see the Spanish landscape in the background? The hand holding the egg mirrors the man sitting in the water. There are a lot of odd things going on in the background that don't seem to be connected. What else can you see?

Source: BFI Image rights of Salvador Dali reserved. Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2007

Salvador Dalí was a very eccentric man. Here is a picture of him

You can always recognise him because he has a funny moustache. He liked to dress in crazy clothes and have long hair which people found very shocking at the time.

Dalí was even expelled from art school just before his final exams because he said that none of the teachers were qualified to examine him. Cheeky!

Salvador Dalí Lobster Telephone (1938) Tate

Salvador Dalí went to Paris after leaving art school, which was where he met the surrealists. The surrealists appealed to his wild sense of humour, they invented surrealist games and enjoyed putting different objects together to make something playful and disturbing at the same time. Here is Dalí's version of a surrealist sculpture. It is called Lobster Telephone. You couldn't call anything on that!

What two objects would you put together to create a surreal sculpture?

Salvador Dalí Autumnal Cannibalism (1936) Tate

In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out and Dalí was greatly affected by it. This is a painting Dalí made about the war.

The background is mainly brown, yellow and black, representing the Spanish landscape. The strange forms in the foreground represent a man and a woman. It's pretty gross, but they are eating bits of each other's flesh with a knife, a fork and a spoon. Dalí uses this shocking idea to say something very powerful and important. He is saying that by fighting, the Spanish people are destroying their country and each other.

Film stills of Salvador Dalí spraying foam in a happening filmed by Peter Beard 1964 Courtesy Benn Northover, Jonas Mekas

When Dalí was in Paris he also made a film with the director Luis Buñuel called Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). It was the first surrealist film and had no plot, just a series of scenes that only slightly link together. Later, Dalí went to Hollywood and worked on other films with famous directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.

Dalí liked to use lots of different materials to make art, including paint, sculpture and film. He even designed furniture, jewels and scenery for theatre production. He was a man of many talents and he is still seen as a great artist who influences many artists today!

What do you think of Dalí's artwork? Is it funny, weird...scary?

More to explore

Draw a Surreal Creature

Quiz: Which Surrealist Artist Are You?

The Sensational Surrealism Quiz

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Salvador Dali Biography: Master of Surrealism and Artistic Innovator

Salvador dali biography: surrealism’s iconic visionary.

Salvador Dali , a name synonymous with artistic brilliance and eccentricity, stands tall as one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century. Renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to the surrealist movement, Dali’s unique artistic style pushed the boundaries of imagination and challenged the norms of traditional art. From melting clocks to dreamlike landscapes, his canvases transported viewers into the enigmatic realm of the subconscious. In this comprehensive biography, we delve into the extraordinary life and mesmerizing artistry of Salvador Dali, unraveling the intricate threads that shaped his mesmerizing journey.

Dali’s journey is one that marries reality with the surreal, a dance between the known and the fantastical. His canvases often transcended conventional reality, embracing a visual language that stirred emotions, sparked introspection, and ignited conversations. As we traverse the chapters of his life, we uncover the early inspirations that ignited his creative spark, propelling him towards a lifelong exploration of the extraordinary.

From his captivating works that bore his unmistakable imprint to his groundbreaking techniques that redefined artistic expression, Dali’s impact was profound and far-reaching. His surrealism went beyond the canvas, permeating into every facet of his existence. From his eccentric mustache to his flamboyant personality, Dali embodied his artistry, blurring the lines between creator and creation.

Through the tapestry of Dali’s life, we’ll unearth his evolution from a budding artist to a global sensation. We’ll delve into his collaborations that left an indelible mark on various mediums, and we’ll navigate the controversies that added layers of complexity to his persona.

Join us as we embark on a journey through the life, art, and legacy of Salvador Dali – a man who dared to dream beyond the limits of reality and gave life to the extraordinary within us all.

Personal and Professional Detail

Early life and artistic beginnings.

Salvador Dali’s extraordinary journey began on May 11, 1904, in the picturesque town of Figueres, nestled in the heart of Catalonia, Spain. From a young age, Dali exhibited an innate fascination with the world of art, showing an uncanny ability to capture the essence of his surroundings with a stroke of his brush.

Dali’s artistic acumen was nurtured by his parents, particularly his mother, Felipa Domènech Ferres, who recognized his creative potential early on. His mother’s unwavering support allowed young Dali to explore his artistic impulses freely, laying the foundation for his artistic prowess.

At the tender age of 10, Dali received formal artistic education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. It was during these formative years that Dali’s talents began to blossom, and his exploration of various artistic styles began to take shape. As he studied the works of the old masters and engaged with contemporary artistic movements, he felt a magnetic pull towards the surrealist movement, which would come to define his legacy.

Dali’s foray into surrealism was catalyzed by his encounter with key mentors, including the eminent surrealist artist Joan Miró and the renowned filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Their influence guided him into the world of dreamscapes, distorted realities, and subconscious symbolism – hallmarks of surrealism. This marked a turning point in Dali’s artistic journey, steering him towards the path of innovation and experimentation.

The amalgamation of his family’s encouragement, formal education, and exposure to visionary mentors propelled Dali into the realm of surrealist artistry. With his canvas as a gateway to the unknown, Dali embarked on a lifelong quest to unravel the mysteries of the mind and transcribe them onto his artistic masterpieces. The vivid landscapes of his imagination would soon come to life, capturing the hearts and minds of art enthusiasts around the globe.

Surrealist Movement and Key Works

Salvador Dali’s artistic journey became inseparably intertwined with the surrealist movement, a radical and revolutionary approach to art that aimed to unravel the complexities of the subconscious mind. Dali’s active involvement in the movement was marked by his unapologetic embrace of its principles, making him one of its most prominent and celebrated figures.

At the core of Dali’s surrealism lay a profound exploration of the human psyche. His works sought to transcend the boundaries of reality and delve into the realm of dreams, fantasies, and the inexplicable. Through his art, Dali painted a vivid tapestry of the inner workings of the mind, often blurring the lines between the conscious and the subconscious.

Among Dali’s most iconic works, “The Persistence of Memory” stands as a testament to his mastery of surrealism. The painting features melting clocks draped over surreal landscapes, capturing the fluidity of time and the malleability of reality. The imagery serves as a poignant reminder of the impermanence of existence and the enigmatic nature of time itself.

Another noteworthy masterpiece, “The Elephants,” showcases Dali’s penchant for juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements to create a harmonious yet unsettling composition. In this painting, elongated and spindly-legged elephants carry obelisks on their backs, representing the weight of memories and the burdens of the mind. The symbolism speaks to Dali’s fascination with the subconscious and the intricate interplay between memory and reality.

Dali’s art was characterized by his unique brand of symbolism, often drawing from his own dreams, fears, and obsessions. He utilized distorted forms, unexpected juxtapositions, and hyper-realistic details to challenge the viewer’s perceptions and provoke contemplation. His works encouraged introspection and invited viewers to explore the depths of their own consciousness.

Through his surrealist masterpieces, Salvador Dali redefined the boundaries of artistic expression, crafting a realm where reality and imagination converged. His ability to translate the intangible into tangible art remains a testament to his brilliance as an artist and a philosopher of the mind. Dali’s legacy within the surrealist movement continues to inspire generations, urging them to question the limits of reality and explore the mysteries of the human psyche.

Innovative Techniques and Collaborations

Salvador Dali’s artistic genius extended beyond his surrealist visions; it manifested in his relentless pursuit of innovative techniques that pushed the boundaries of traditional art. One of his most notable contributions was the development of the paranoiac-critical method—a revolutionary approach that allowed him to tap into the hidden recesses of his mind and create astonishingly imaginative artworks.

The paranoiac-critical method involved harnessing the power of paranoia and delusion to interpret and visualize new dimensions of reality. Dali believed that by embracing these irrational thought processes, he could unravel the hidden meanings within his subconscious. This technique led to artworks like “The Sacrament of the Last Supper,” where distorted figures and surreal elements emerge from a fragmented canvas. Through this method, Dali challenged viewers to engage with art on a deeper, psychological level, forcing them to explore the intricate tapestry of their own perceptions.

Dali’s artistic journey was also punctuated by meaningful collaborations with fellow creatives. His interactions with writers like Federico Garcia Lorca and filmmakers like Luis Bunuel resulted in groundbreaking projects that enriched multiple artistic domains. His collaboration with the iconic director Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence for the film “Spellbound” further cemented his reputation as an artist unafraid of merging the realms of art and cinema.

In the film, Dali’s surreal imagery takes center stage, creating a dreamscape that blurs the line between reality and the subconscious. His fascination with psychoanalysis and dream interpretation seamlessly melded with Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense, resulting in a sequence that leaves an indelible mark on both film and art history.

Salvador Dali’s legacy lies not only in his individual artistry but also in his capacity to bridge disciplines and explore uncharted creative territories. His innovative techniques and collaborations illuminated new possibilities within the artistic landscape, inspiring future generations to challenge norms, push artistic boundaries, and craft unique narratives that resonate across mediums. Dali’s influence remains a testament to the limitless potential of creative exploration and the enduring power of collaboration.

Controversies and Personal Life

Salvador Dali’s artistic brilliance was matched only by his enigmatic and controversial personal life. While his surrealist masterpieces garnered admiration, his behavior and beliefs often stirred both fascination and criticism. Dali’s penchant for controversy was evident in various aspects of his life, from his political views to his unconventional lifestyle.

One of the most significant controversies revolved around Dali’s relationship with the surrealist movement itself. Despite being a founding member, he was eventually expelled due to irreconcilable differences. His insistence on his unique artistic vision clashed with the movement’s evolving principles, leading to his departure. This departure marked a turning point in Dali’s artistic journey, as he ventured into a realm characterized by eccentricity and individualism.

Dali’s personal life was equally unconventional. His marriage to Gala Dali, a muse and collaborator, became a subject of fascination. While their relationship was marked by devotion, it was also mired in rumors and complexities. Gala’s role in shaping Dali’s artistic endeavors cannot be understated, yet the nuances of their partnership often blurred the lines between muse and manipulator.

Moreover, Dali’s flamboyant personality and self-promotion techniques further added to his mystique. His eccentric public appearances, theatrical clothing choices, and calculated statements were all part of a larger strategy to perpetuate his image as an eccentric genius. These calculated actions, while captivating audiences, also drew criticism from those who believed he was sacrificing authenticity for attention.

In delving into Dali’s controversies and personal life, it becomes evident that his legacy extends beyond the canvas. His complex personality, unapologetic behavior, and willingness to challenge norms made him a polarizing figure. Dali’s ability to evoke strong reactions, whether admiration or skepticism, solidified his position as an artist who defied convention not only in his art but also in his life choices.

Later Years and Legacy

As Salvador Dali entered the later years of his life, the vigor and dynamism that had characterized his earlier years began to wane. Health issues took a toll on the once vibrant artist, and his artistic output underwent a transformation reflective of his changing circumstances.

Dali’s later years were marked by a decline in his physical health, which impacted his ability to create art on the same scale and intensity as before. Despite this, he continued to produce works that showcased his unwavering commitment to pushing artistic boundaries. The themes of mortality and existential contemplation that had always lurked beneath his surrealist visions became more pronounced, as if grappling with his own mortality had become an intrinsic part of his art.

While his health declined, Dali’s influence on modern art remained steadfast. His innovative techniques, unconventional ideas, and distinctive style had left an indelible mark on the art world. The legacy of surrealism, in which Dali played a pivotal role, continued to inspire artists and creators to explore the realm of dreams, subconscious, and unconventional realities.

Dali’s lasting impact extended beyond the art world, permeating pop culture and influencing various artistic mediums. His imagery became iconic, recognized even by those who might not be well-versed in art history. From album covers to advertisements, Dali’s surreal aesthetic found its way into the fabric of popular imagery.

In reflecting on Dali’s legacy, one cannot ignore his role in transforming art into a realm of limitless possibilities. His ability to turn imagination into tangible creations, his audacious exploration of the subconscious, and his defiance of artistic norms have left an enduring legacy. Salvador Dali’s journey from a young artist in Spain to a globally recognized surrealist icon remains a testament to the power of embracing individuality, pushing boundaries, and reshaping the very essence of art itself.

Salvador Dali’s artistic journey has left an indelible mark on the canvas of modern art, painting a surreal landscape that continues to intrigue and inspire. From his early days in Figueres, Spain, to his emergence as a luminary of the surrealist movement, Dali’s contribution to the world of art remains unparalleled.

Dali’s legacy is characterized by his audacious exploration of the subconscious, his mastery of symbolism, and his innovative techniques that shattered conventional artistic norms. His iconic works, like “The Persistence of Memory” and “The Elephants,” stand as testaments to his ability to challenge reality and immerse audiences in a dreamlike realm.

Beyond his artistic prowess, Dali’s persona was as enigmatic as his creations. His controversies, complex personality, and collaboration with figures like Alfred Hitchcock added layers of intrigue to his legacy. Yet, at the heart of it all, Dali’s dedication to self-expression and his unwavering belief in the power of imagination set him apart as an artistic visionary.

As we contemplate Salvador Dali’s legacy, we are reminded that his influence goes beyond the canvas; it has permeated culture, fashion, and the very essence of creative thought. His work continues to resonate with those who seek to explore the boundaries of reality and challenge the norm. Dali’s surrealist journey invites us to journey through the labyrinth of the mind, daring us to see the world in new, unconventional ways.

In the pantheon of art history, Salvador Dali remains a luminary whose legacy illuminates the limitless possibilities of human imagination. His art is a reflection of the wondrous and mysterious facets of life, inviting us to embark on a voyage where reality and dreams intertwine. Through his creations, Dali beckons us to step into the surreal and explore the profound depths of human creativity and expression. 

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Salvador Dali FAQs

Who was salvador dali.

Salvador Dali was a renowned Spanish artist known for his surreal and imaginative artworks. He was a leading figure in the surrealist movement and is celebrated for his unique style and creative vision.

What is Salvador Dali famous for?

Salvador Dali is famous for his surreal and dreamlike paintings that often defied conventional reality. His iconic works include "The Persistence of Memory" and "The Elephants," which showcase his mastery of symbolism and innovative artistic techniques.

What is the significance of "The Persistence of Memory" painting?

"The Persistence of Memory" is one of Salvador Dali's most famous paintings, depicting melting clocks in a dreamlike landscape. It's often interpreted as a representation of the fluidity of time and the subconscious mind.

Did Salvador Dali work in other mediums besides painting?

Yes, Salvador Dali was a versatile artist who worked in various mediums, including sculpture, film, photography, and even fashion. His creativity extended beyond traditional canvas art.

What is Dali's paranoiac-critical method?

Dali's paranoiac-critical method was an artistic technique he developed to tap into his subconscious mind. It involved embracing paranoia and irrationality to create unique and unexpected images.

What controversies surrounded Salvador Dali?

Salvador Dali was often associated with eccentric behavior and controversies. His tumultuous personal life, including his relationships and political views, added to his mystique and public image.

How did Salvador Dali influence modern art?

Dali's influence on modern art is profound. His surrealism challenged artistic norms, paving the way for experimentation and abstract expression. His work has inspired generations of artists to think outside the box.

What is Dali's legacy in popular culture?

Dali's legacy transcends art and has left an impact on popular culture. His iconic mustache, distinctive fashion sense, and surrealistic ideas continue to influence fashion, film, music, and advertising.

Where can I see Salvador Dali's artworks?

Many of Salvador Dali's artworks are displayed in museums and galleries around the world. The Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain, is dedicated to his work and houses a significant collection of his creations.

What is the lasting impact of Salvador Dali's art?

Salvador Dali's art continues to captivate audiences and challenge perceptions. His ability to merge reality and imagination has left an enduring impact on the art world, inspiring artists and art enthusiasts to embrace creativity without boundaries.

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Biography Online

Biography Salvador Dali

Short bio Salvador Dali

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

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

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

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

– Salvador Dali

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

Early life of Dali

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

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

A Dali painting

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

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

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

The persistence of memory

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

Salvador Dali wrote on the importance and symbolism of surrealism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secret Life of Salvador Dali

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The Persistence of Memory

• The Persistence of Memory – (one of Dali’s most famous works) at Amazon.com
• The Persistence of Memory –  at Amazon.co.uk

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Salvador Dali Biography

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

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

The Early Years

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

Dali and Surrealism

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

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

Gala and the Classical Movement

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

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

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

The Final Years

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

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

Salvador Dali Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salvador Dali Types of Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject Matter of His Artwork; Dali Theatre Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dali Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biography of Salvador Dali

Short biography of salvador dali .

Dali and Gala were two Spanish surrealist artists who married each other and worked together to create some of their most iconic works.

They were known for their dreamlike and fantastical imagery, often incorporating the natural world, religious symbolism, and subconscious elements into their paintings.

Early Life of Salvador Dali

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domènech is one of the best-known surrealist artists.

With his enormous talent for drawing, he painted his unconscious mind precisely.

He was the son of Salvador and Felipa Dome (Domenech) Dali and was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueras, Spain.

Dali’s father was a notary (one who signs important documents).

In his autobiography, Dali claims that in his youth, he had angry outbursts directed at his parents and classmates, who treated him cruelly.

Dali attended the Institute in Figueres, Spain and Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas.

By 1921, he had convinced his father that he could support himself as an artist and got permission to travel to Madrid, Spain, to pursue a career in painting. 

The surreal painter of Italy, Giorgio de Chirico, greatly impacted him (1888–1978).

He was a bright kid who started painting creative pictures at a young age.

Additionally, he experimented with cubism (a style of art that uses simple geometric shapes and forms to show objects in a different way than usual, challenging the usual way of seeing things by playing with perspectives and making the art look less realistic). 

Eventually, Spanish authorities temporarily detained Dali for political opposition activities before his expulsion from art school in 1925.

Association with the Surrealist movement

After a while, Dali developed his unique technique. 

He would sketch the bizarre subjects from his dream world with remarkable precision. 

Each finely drawn object stood out strangely from the surrounding things and was in a space that frequently seemed to lean abruptly upward.

After leaving school, Dali emerged as one of the era’s great artists. 

The one person from whom he was most eager to learn was Pablo Picasso. 

He first encountered Picasso in 1926; the Catalan genius’s art significantly impacted Dali.

He also learned from the painters René Magritte and Joan Miró.

For surrealists, art is a way to explore their unconscious minds.

Dali first came in contact with the movement by seeing paintings.

After that, he visited Paris, France, in 1928 to meet with other surrealist artists.

The Persistence of Memory, one of his most famous works, is a landscape full of melting pocket watches.

Throughout the 1930s, Dal’s relationship with Surrealists was strained, especially with André Breton, the movement’s leader and creator. 

His arrogant attitude and refusal to adapt his actions and attitudes to the Surrealist objective led to growing discord among the group.

Breton grew more outspoken in his criticism of Dali’s rising fame and commercialism, giving him the anagram nickname “Avida Dollars.”

Despite the tension and disagreements, Dali continued participating in Surrealist shows and gained much attention to the movement.

In 1934, a key event in Dali’s life was meeting his wife, Gala, who was then married to another surrealist. 

She became the main influence in his paintings and personal life. 

By 1939, Dal had wholly cut all ties with the Surrealists. 

His association with artistic movements and organizations ended when he left the Surrealists.

He remained an independent artist for the rest of his life, creating his style and exploring his introspective and paranoid pathways.

Later Years

In 1974, Dali ended his relationship with English business manager Peter Moore.

 As a result, other managers sold the rights to his artwork without including him in any form of profits.

In 1980, A. Reynolds Morse of Cleveland, Ohio, set up  Friends to Save Dali. 

By then, Dali had lost much of his riches, and the foundation’s goal was to get him back on firm financial ground.

At the Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983, Dali exhibited many of his artworks. 

This exhibition made him famous in Spain and a favorite of the Spanish royal family and major collectors worldwide.

After being hurt in a house fire in 1984, Dali confined himself to a  wheelchair.

On 23 January 1989, he took his last breath in Figueras, Spain.

Before his death, he witnessed the inauguration of two museums dedicated to his art, Teatre-Museu in Figueres ( Dali Museum ) and the Salvador Dali Museum in ST. Petersburg, Florida.

Today he is remembered as one of the greatest Surrealist artists.

Gala Dali Biography

“I name my wife: Gala, Galushka, Gradiva; Oliva, for the oval shape of her face and the color of her skin; Oliveta, diminutive for Olive; and its delirious derivatives Oliueta, Oriueta, Buribeta, Buriueteta, Suliueta, Solibubuleta, Oliburibuleta, Ciueta, Liueta. I also call her Lionette because when she gets angry, she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion”

Salvador Dali’s muse and wife, Elena Ivanovna Diakonova (Kazan – Russian Empire, 1894, Cadaques – Spain, 1982), was a  highly intellectual and mysterious woman.

Ever since Dali and Gala first met in 1929, Gala has played a massive role in her husband’s life.

They were together for 53 years without being apart.

Gala Dali Early Life

Galina Sergeevna Dyakonova was born to Sergei and Anna Dyakonov in late-1890s Moscow, Russia. 

She had two older brothers, Vadim and Nikolai, and a younger sister, Lidia. 

Gala’s father died when she was just eleven years old. Later, her mother remarried a lawyer.

Fortunately for Gala, this new union proved beneficial; she developed close bonds with her stepfather, who aided her significantly in acquiring an education.

She graduated from M.G Brukhonenko Academy for young ladies with remarkable grades. 

 Eventually, she became a primary school teacher, giving private lessons in people’s homes.

In 1912 she traveled to Clavadel sanatorium in Switzerland to treat Tuberculosis.

There she met her first husband, Eugene Grindel (later known as Paul Elurad).

In 1917 they got married, and Gala’s only child Cwcile was born the following year. 

Eluard was a poet and had close relations with the prominent figures of the surrealist movement, particularly Max Ernst, Louis Aragon and André Breton.

In 1922, Gala and Max Ernst started dating, but their relationship ended in 1924.

Her association with the poet René Char, particularly René Crevel, is also notable.

In April 1929, Dali went to Paris to present his film, where Camille Goemans, a gallery owner, introduced Salvador to Paul Eluard.

Salvador Dalí invited a few close friends to spend the summer in Cadaqués, including Paul Eluard, Gala, and their daughter Cécile. 

Upon meeting Gala for the first time, it was love at first sight.

In his Secret Life, he stated: “Gala was destined to be my Gradiva ( name taken from the novel by W. Jensen. Gradiva was the book’s heroine who brought psychological healing to the main character of the book) the one who moves me forward— my wife, my victory”.  

And Gala was to remain by the painter’s side for the rest of her life; thus, her biography tied with Dalí forever.

Gala and Salvador DalÍ Love Story

Gala and her family and friends first met Dali in 1929 during a trip to Cadaques.

The gallery owner and Belgian poet Camille Goemans introduced Dali to Eluard In Paris.

Despite having a ten-year age difference, Dali and Gala’s love affair developed quickly. 

In 1934 they both got married in a civil ceremony.

Dali’s father initially disapproved of the union because he did not want a Russian divorcee as one of his sons’ suitors.

Despite criticisms from different quarters, the two passionate people moved in together.

Gala was Dal’s muse, the subject of his obsession, and he portrayed her in many of his works of art. 

In his autobiography “My Secret Life.” he mentioned, “She was actually supposed to become my Gradiva, the one who marches forward, my victory, and my bride”.

Gala motivated him to paint and greatly impacted his artistic output.

It was in 1958 when Gala and Dali married in a catholic ceremony at the Angels chapel near Girona.

In 1968, Dali bought Gala Castle in Pubol, Girona and agreed that he would not go there without her consent.

Gala has been described as “the most visible falling star, the most clearly defined, and the most finite” by Dali. 

Gala passed away on June 10th, 1982, two years before Dali.

She lives in the crypt of the Pubol castle, a section of the estate owned and run by the Gala Salvador Dali Foundation and is today a popular tourist destination.

 In his book “Diary of Genius” Dali said, “I love her more than my father, more than my mother, more than Picasso, and even more than money.”

By booking this combo ticket for Dali Museum and Dali House , you may witness firsthand the passionate yet twisted love tale of one of the greatest surrealism artists. Don’t forget to check the opening hours to avoid disappointment.

Salvador Dali Biography Books

Many books are available on the life and work of Salvador Dali, ranging from biographies to art history books. Here are some popular options:

• The Secret Life of Salvador Dali Author-  Salvador Dali About- Salvador Dali brief biography by Dali himself provides insights into his life and creative process. 
• Dali: The Paintings Author- Robert Descharnes  About- This book is a comprehensive catalog of Dali’s paintings, accompanied by essays and analyses.
• Salvador Dali: The Making of an Artist Author- Catherine Grenier About- This biography of Salvador Dali explores his childhood, education, and early career as an artist.
• Dali and His World Author- Patricia Railing About-  This book provides an overview of Dali’s life and work and the cultural and historical context in which he lived.
• Salvador Dali: The Surrealist Jester Author- Mike Venezia About- This children’s book introduces young readers to Dali’s life and art in a fun and accessible way.

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Salvador Dali Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Persistence of Memory

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

Short Biography of Salvador Dali

Reading Comprehension: Short Biography of Salvador Dali

Develop your reading skills. Read the following short biography of Salvador Dali and do the comprehension below:

Salvador Dali was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, on 11 May 1904. Dali’s father was strict in the education of his children, unlike his mother. Dali had a brother named Salvador who was born nine months before him and died of gastroenteritis. When he was five, Dalí­ was taken to his brother’s grave and was told that he was his brother’s reincarnation.

At an early age, Salvador Dali’s parents encouraged him to produce highly sophisticated drawings, and was sent to a drawing school in Figueres, Spain, in 1916.

In February 1921, Dalí­’s mother died of breast cancer. Dalí­ was 16 years old; he later said his mother’s death was the greatest blow he had experienced in his life. After her death, Dalí­’s father married his deceased wife’s sister. Dalí­ did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

The development of his own style

In 1922, Dalí­ moved to Madrid and studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando where he already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He was influenced by several different artistic styles, including Metaphysics and Cubism. Dalí­ was expelled from the Academy in 1926, shortly before his final exams when he was accused of starting an unrest.

Later, Dali visited Paris where he met Pablo Picasso whom he revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí­ from Joan Miró, a fellow Catalan who introduced him to many Surrealist friends. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dalí­ made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró.

Marriage to Gala

In August 1929, Dalí­ met his lifelong and primary muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala . She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior. They married in 1934. In addition to inspiring many artworks throughout her life, Gala would act as Dalí­’s business manager.

Dali’s work

Dalí­ was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory , was completed in August 1931. Dalí­’s expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Arab lineage

Dalí­ attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to an “Arab lineage”, claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Eccentric manner

Dalí­ was highly imaginative and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

In 1980 at age 76, Dalí­’s health took a catastrophic turn. His right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms. His near-senile wife allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic capacity.

His wife Gala died on 10 June 1982, at the age of 87. After Gala”s death, Dalí­ lost much of his will to live. On the morning of 23 January 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, Dalí­ died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84.

Source: Wikipedia

Comprehension:

Are these statements True or False:

• Salvador Dali’s father was lenient in the education of his children. (…)
• Salvador Dali’s brother, Salvador, died of gastroenteritis. Answer: True
• Salvador Dali was expelled from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1926. (…)
• Salvador Dali’s primary muse and future wife, Gala, was younger than him. (…)
• Salvador Dali attributed his love for luxury and oriental clothes to his Arab lineage. (…)

Related Pages:

• Salvador Dali
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• 10 Books About Salvador Dali...

10 Books About Salvador Dalí All Art Lovers Should Know

A painter but also an author, draftsman and cinematographer, Salvador Dalí is one of the most celebrated European artists of all time. He is best known for his role in driving the surrealist movement, while in his personal life he is famous for his taste for luxury, exoticism and provocation. These are ten books that all admirers of Dalí’s work should know.

The secret life of salvador dalí by salvador dalí.

What better way to gain insight into the great Dalí’s life than by reading his autobiography? A sturdy 400 pages long, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí covers the artist’s life from his early childhood up until the outbreak of the Second World War. The book attracted a mixture of criticism and appraisal when it was first published, with George Orwell famously stating that ‘his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight’.

Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali

This second book is also an autobiography but written by the artist in the latter part of his life and covering the period of the 1950s and 1960s when he was living with his wife, Gala. In Diary of a Genius he discusses how he draws inspiration from everything from excrement to rotten fish to compose his work, as well as talking about his love for his partner and muse.

Dali: The Work, The Man by Robert Descharnes

This large book – 14.5 inches tall, 10.5 inches wide and 9 pounds in weight – is one of the most comprehensive guides to Dalí’s life and work there is. It divides his artistic life into twelve periods ranging from the 1910s up until his death in 1989, and makes the most of its big format to include some splendid full page prints of his work.

Les Dîners de Gala by Salvador Dali

Did you know that among the many things Dalí accomplished in his life, publishing a cook book was one of them? Les Diners de Gala is an homage to the lavish dinner parties organised by himself and his wife Gala, revealing the sensuality, exoticism and imaginative flair which were the main ingredients at these infamous gatherings.

Salvador Dali Erotic Sketches with essay by Norbert Wolf

Offering a fresh perspective on the artist’s body of work, as the title itself suggests the subject of Salvador Dalí Erotic Sketches are the many drawings and watercolours made by Dalí. Revealing his classical training and skill as a draftsman, the book is mostly visual although it concludes with a thoughtful essay by art historian Norbert Wolf.

Dali: A Study Of His Life And Work by the New York Graphic Society

Despite it’s comprehensive sounding title, this book was published some twenty years before Dalí’s death and so misses out on some of the artist’s later works. However of the periods it does cover, it does so exceptionally well, going into great detail about the events and people which influenced his early career.

Dalí And His Books by Eduard Fornes

This book is an impressive catalogue not of Dalí’s paintings but of his writings and illustrations. Dalí And His Books is divided into two sections – ‘Dalí the writer’ and ‘Dalí the illustrator’ – and lists an albeit incomplete but nonetheless remarkably well informed list of his illustrations for books and magazines, as well as his own written texts with detailed annotations for each.

Dalí by Luis Romero

This insightful book combines publicly known facts about Dalí’s life and work with the authors own first-hand experience of the artist. What results is a unique depiction of Dalí’s personality, character and genius, while focusing on some of the most famous works from the period up until the book’s publication in the early 1960s.

In Quest of Dalí by Carlton Lake

Something of a collector’s item, In Quest of Dalí is the author’s account of his journey to uncover the mysteries and magic of Dalí’s world. The book contains some black and white illustrations but is mostly admirable for the insight it offers into the artist’s personal and social life in the 1960s. Combining the personal and public, it attempts to shed some light on the life of this most intriguing of subjects.

The World of Salvador Dalí by Robert Descharnes

At the time of its publication back in the 1960s, The World of Salvador Dalí was considered remarkable for the inclusion of some hitherto rarely seen prints. While today most of these are well-known to the public, the book remains relevant and appreciated by the artist’s fans, not least for some of the images of Dalí in his home and in private settings.

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April 25, 2024

Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Painter » Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was a world famous Spanish painter. According to critics, his works of art take a viewer to the inner of his subconscious part of the mind. As a matter of fact, he is one of the greatest pioneers of the surrealist style of painting. He influenced many prominent artists and sculptors to move out from the traditional and repetitive styles of creation. Nowadays many scholars of art around the world say that he was one of the major figures of aesthetics of the 20th century.

Dali born on 11 May in 1904 in Figueres, Spain. His father Salvador Dali i Cusi was a lawyer and mother Felipa Domenech Ferres was a housewife. From his childhood days, he was very arrogant and intelligent. His relationship with his father was not very good, while his mother always used to praise him. When he somehow came to know that his family believed him as the reincarnation of his dead elder brother, his artistic scene turned towards a transcendental way. That incident helped him to become a surrealist artist.

As a matter of fact, his parents used to praise his talent. They made him a studio and admitted him into a drawing school in 1916. He was very irregular in school. His father once arranged an exhibition for him in 1919. In 1922 he admitted into a famous art institute in Madrid. There he started to learn cubism and dadaism.

The academy suspended him in 1923 for his association with anti-establishment activities, though he was not associated with politics that much. Although he returned to his academy in 1926, it suspended him permanently for his cynic outlook about his teachers. After that incident, Dali traveled to Paris and met Pablo Picasso. He left classical style and inspired by Picasso. His works began to become popular.

Dali painted his famous ‘The Persistence of Memory’ in 1931 which became his landmark. His surrealistic style came into a more outstanding point. Though he supported Franco as a ruler of Spain, he stayed in the USA during the 2nd world war.

After ending the war, Dali returned to Spain and began to experiment more inventive works which influenced the later pop arts. He worked for the museum and Dali theater in Figueres in 1960’s. ‘The Elephants’, ‘Premonition of Civil War’, ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’, ‘Spider of the Evening’, ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’ etc are his ageless works of art.

Salvador Dali died on 23 January in 1989. His grave is in his hometown Figueres.

• Birthday: May 11, 1904
• Birthplace: Figueres, Spain
• Star Sign: Taurus
• Profession: Painter
• Died: 1989, January 23
• Spouse: Gala Dalí (m. 1958–1982), Gala Dalí (m. 1934–1958)

External Links

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