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 holiday in Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist, he approached modern painting.The following year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in the family residence.

In 1922 Salvador Dalí moved to Madrid where he enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando . In this period he stayed in the Residencia de Estudiantes where he stood out for his eccentric and extravagant attitude and for his first paintings which were influenced by Cubism.

During his stay at the Residencia he formed strong friendships with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca and approached Dadaism which would influence him for the rest of his life.

In 1926, shortly before taking his final exams, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Academia for claiming that no one in the institute 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 in 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, then wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard.Also in 1929 he adhered to Surrealism and joined the group of Montparnasse Surrealists.

In 1931 Salvador Dalì painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory , the surrealistic symbolic image of limp watches on the verge of melting; melting watches represent memory, which loses strength and resistance as it ages.

In 1934 the painter entered the American art market presented by the art dealer Julian Levy. His New York exhibition, which included The Persistence of Memory, immediately created a sensation and interest.

In 1936 he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. He arrives at his presentation conference, titled Fantômes paranoïaques authentiques, dressed in a diver's suit and helmet and holding a billiard cue in his hand and with two Russian greyhounds on a leash.

In this period, Salvador Dalí's main patron is the very rich Edward James , who supports him financially for two years and who the artist portrays in his painting Swans reflecting elephants . The two became good friends and their collaboration gave rise to the artist's most iconic works, the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lip-Shaped Sofa.

In 1939 André Breton, who began to harshly criticize, together with other surrealists of the time, the work of the famous artist, coined the denigrating nickname of Avida Dollars< for the Spanish painter t9>, an anagram of Salvador Dalí which can be translated as greedy for dollars. This is a way of mocking the increasing commercialization of Dalí's works and the perception that Dalí himself sought to aggrandize himself through fame and money. Some surrealists thereafter speak of Dalí only in the past tense, as if he were dead.

The Second World War broke out in Europe and the Dalí couple moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years.

At the end of the war, in 1951 Salvador Dalí returned to live in his beloved Catalonia. His 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 at 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 Theater-Museum in Figueres.