SALVADOR DALI BIOGRAPHY

Salvador Dalí: Born: May, 11, 1904, Figueras, Catalonia, Spain. Dali is considered to be one of the most impressive artists of the 20th century. Salvador Dalí studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He wrote the screenplay for Buńuel's Un Chien Andalou. From 1950 - 65 Dali wrote several books. He described his pictures as "hand-painted dream photographs". Dalí died, Jan. 23, 1989. Salvador Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domčnech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. Salvador Dalí collaborated with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released posthumously in 2003. Dalí also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence from his 1945 film Spellbound. Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully-sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

Swans Reflecting Elephants, c.1937 Poster
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Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domčnech, was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordŕ region close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinarian approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In 1949 she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers, Sagibarbá and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together. Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916 Dalí 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, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. Salvador Dalí had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919. In February 1921, Dalí's mother died. After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister.

In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and there studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A tall Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee breeches in the fashion style of the English aesthetes of the late 19th century. But his paintings, where Salvador Dalí experimented with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, Salvador Dalí probably did not completely understand the movement, since his only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, and there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924 the still unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated for the first time a book. It was the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, the poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life. At the Residencia, Salvador Dalí became close friends with, among others, Pepín Bello, Luis Buńuel, and the poet Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí fearfully rejected the erotic advances of the poet. Dalí 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 is well documented by that time in his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in 1926. That same year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dalí from Joan Miró. Dalí did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró over the next few years as he developed his own style. Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic, evidencing a familiarity with Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez, to the most cutting-edge avant-garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention and mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics. Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by that of seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with the surrealistic film director Luis Buńuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was helping Buńuel write the script for the film. Also that year, in August, he met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior who was then married to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years). The surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity. Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala and his connection to the Surrealists, a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona paper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing picturing the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ with the provocative saying: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait". Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dali refused, perhaps for fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was 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 Cadaqučs again. The following summer Dalí and Gala would rent a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. Salvador Dalí bought the place and over the years he enlarged it little by little, building his much beloved villa by the sea.

In 1931, Dalí 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 the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape and the ants and fly devouring the other watches. Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony (They remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958). Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934, and the exhibition of Dalí works (including Persistence) in New York created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball". Salvador Dalí showed up wearing on his chest a glass case containing a brassiere. In 1936, Salvador Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. Salvador Dalí 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." When Francisco Franco came to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí's support of the new regime, among other things, eventually resulted in his purported expulsion from the surrealist group. At this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism." André Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dalí), which more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which he referred to Dalí after the period of his expulsion. The surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he was dead. At this stage his main patron was the very wealthy Edward James. The surrealist movement and various members would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond. Edward James helped the young Salvador Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and supporting him financially for two years. They became good friends and James features in Dalí's painting ‘Swans Reflecting Elephants.’ They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa. "During this period Dalí never stopped writing", wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes. In 1941, he drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. Salvador Dalí wrote a novel (published in 1944) about a fashion salon for automobiles. This got a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald showing him dressing an automobile in an evening gown." In 1940, as World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. In 1942, Salvador Dalí published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.

The Elephants, c.1948 Art Print
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Starting in 1949, Salvador Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that Salvador Dalí chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and many other artists. As such, it is probable that at least some of the common dismissal of Dalí's later works had more to do with politics than the actual merits 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 Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Late in his career, Dalí 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. Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s when he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns, signifying divine geometry (as the rhinoceros horn grows according to a logarithmic spiral) and chastity (as Dalí linked the rhinoceros to the Virgin Mary). Dalí was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube - a 4-dimensional cube - and an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). Dalí's post-World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science and religion. In paintings such as The Madonna of Port-Lligat (first version) of 1949 and Corpus Hypercubus, 1954, Dalí 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, 1968-1970. In 1960, Salvador Dalí began work on the Dalí 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, Dalí filmed a television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates and in 1969 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, which stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid. In 1980, Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife Gala was dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of non-prescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic ability. At 76 years old, the 'ever-healthy' Dalí was a complete wreck, his right hand trembling terribly, Parkinson-like. In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Salvador Dalí the title Marquis of Pubol, for which Dalí later paid him by giving him a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed. Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. Salvador Dalí 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 possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí 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 for his final years.

In November 1988 Dalí entered the hospital with heart failure. 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, across the street from the church of Sant Pere where he had his funeral, first communion, and baptism, and three blocks from the house where he was born.

The Temptation of St. Anthony, c.1946 Poster
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