Salvador Dalí

Figueres, 1904 – Figueres, 1989

Born in Figueres in 1904 the Catalan artist Salvador Dalí was given his first name, Salvador, after the name of his dead brother who had been born in 1901 and died twenty-two months later. His father was a public notary with republican atheist views and his mother a devout catholic. Dali’s first recorded painting was a landscape in oils supposedly painted in 1910, when he was six years old. While studying at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Dalí became close friends with the older poet Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel with whom he would later collaborate on the films ‘Un Chien Andalou’ and ‘L’Age d’or’. Dali’s early paintings followed the style of Impressionism, Pointillism and for the most part, Cubism. In 1926 he made his first trip to Paris, and on his second visit, his fellow Catalan Miró introduced him to the Surrealist group, whose activities Dalí had read about in a variety of periodicals. Welcomed by the Surrealists as a powerful new imagination Dali became fully associated with the movement in 1929. Fusing the profound influence of Freud on his own deeply disturbed psyche with the painterly style of Tanguy’s mysterious landscapes and images from his home town of Cadaqués, between 1924 and 1936 Dali created a powerfully Surreal visual language that culminated in hi ‘Paranoiac-Critical Method’. In the summer of 1929 Dali met his future wife, muse and personal manager, Gala, when she visited him in Cadaqués with her husband, the poet, Paul Eluard. In 1934 he was expelled from the Surrealist group. Between 1940 and 1948 Dali lived in the United States, where he sought and gained great commercial success. In the 1960s Dali became concerned with ‘recherches visuelles’, exploring the optical mechanisms of illusion and the perceptions of images. The Theatre-Museum Dali officially opened in 1974, and on his death in 1989, he bequeathed his estate to the Kingdom of Spain.