Salvador Dali

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

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. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence from his 1945 film Spellbound.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things in order 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.


Early life

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.[7] Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "…[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."

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. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí 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, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, as some think, because he had a great love and respect toward his aunt.

Madrid and Paris

In 1922, Dalí 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. 7¾ in.)-tall dandy, 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, in which he experimented with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, he 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 (there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time).

In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first time. It was the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent.

Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life. At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and 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 along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.

1929 through World War II

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealistic film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was in helping Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. 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 married at the time to 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 as 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 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. Some say that, upon hearing the bad news, an enraged Dalí handed his father a condom with his own sperm inside, saying, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!" The following summer, Dalí 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 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[citation needed], 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's works (including Persistence) in New York created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case (containing a brassiere) on his chest. In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. 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."

According to Luis Buñuel, Dalí and Gala went to a masquerade party in Chicago dressed as the Lindbergh baby and the kidnapper. The uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists put him on trial for apologizing for a surrealist act.

André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in the "the Hitler phenomenon," but the artist quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." However, 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. 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 were dead. At this stage, his main patron was the very wealthy Edward James. The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) 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 is featured 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. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions like that at the Knoedler Gallery (in New York City in 1943), where 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 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. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947.[ The friar's estate contained a sculpture of Christ on the cross, which Dalí had given his exorcist to thank him. The sculpture was discovered in 2005, and two Spanish experts in surrealism confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.