Salvador Dali Biography

SALVADOR DALI' PAINTER

 

Salvador Dalì was a Spanish painter and sculptor. He was born in Figueres in 1904 to a wealthy bourgeois family.

In 1919, during a vacation in Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist, he became interested in modern painting. The following year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings at the family residence. 

In 1922 Salvador Dalí moved to Madrid where he enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando. During this period, he stayed at the Residencia de Estudiantes where he became known for his eccentric and extravagant behavior and for his early paintings influenced by Cubism. 

During his stay at the Residencia, he forms strong friendships with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca and becomes interested in Dadaism, which will influence him throughout his life.

In 1926, shortly before taking his final exams, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Academia for claiming that no one at the institution was competent enough to examine someone like him. In the same year, he made his first trip to Paris where he met Pablo Picasso, for whom he had boundless admiration.

In 1929, the artist collaborated on writing the screenplay for the short film Un chien andalou by the surrealist director Luis Buñuel. In the same year, he met his future muse and wife Gala, who was then the wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Also in 1929, he joined the Surrealism movement and became part of the Montparnasse surrealists group.

In 1931, Salvador Dalì painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, the surreal symbolic image of melting clocks on the verge of liquefying; the melting clocks represent memory, which, as it ages over the years, loses strength and resilience. 

In 1934, the painter made his entry into the American art market introduced by the art dealer Julian Levy. His New York exhibition, which included The Persistence of Memory, immediately caused a sensation and interest. 

In 1936, he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. He arrived at his presentation conference, titled Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms, dressed in a diving suit and helmet, holding a billiard cue and with two Russian greyhounds on a leash.  

During this period, Salvador Dalí's main patron is the very wealthy Edward James, who supports him financially for two years and whom the artist portrays in his painting Swans Reflecting Elephants. The two become good friends, and from their collaboration originate the artist's most iconic works, the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.

In 1939, André Breton, who, along with other surrealists of the time, began to harshly criticize the work of the famous artist, coined the derogatory nickname Avida Dollars for the Spanish painter, an anagram of Salvador Dalí that can be translated as greedy for dollars. It was a way to mock the increasing commercialization of Dalí's works and the perception that Dalí himself sought to enlarge his persona through fame and money. Some surrealists from then on spoke of Dalí only in the past tense, as if he were dead. 

World War II breaks out in Europe and the Dalí couple move to the United States, where they will live for eight years.

At the end of the war, in 1951 Salvador Dalí returned to live in his beloved Catalonia. The choice to live in Spain, while it was still governed by Franco, attracted harsh criticism from progressives and several other artists. 

In 1960 Salvador Dalí began working on the Dalí Theatre-Museum in his hometown of Figueres.

He died in 1989 at the age of 84 from a heart attack and was buried inside his Theatre-Museum in Figueres.