Salvador Dalí

I

Introduction

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Spanish painter, writer, filmmaker, and designer, and one of the leading figures in the surrealist movement (see Surrealism). His enormous talent for self-publicity made him an international celebrity.

II

Early Years

Dalí was born in Figueres, Catalonia, near Barcelona. His father, a notary, was an atheist and his mother was a devout Catholic. An older brother, also called Salvador, had died nine months before Dalí’s birth, and Dalí later wrote that he identified morbidly with his namesake and had an overwhelming desire for attention. According to the account in his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), his childhood was marked by hallucinations and extraordinarily intense emotional experiences, in which many of his later dreams and obsessions were prefigured.

From an early age Dalí showed a talent for art. Between 1921 and 1926 he studied intermittently at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. In 1924 he was suspended for a year for insubordination, and in 1926 he was expelled for his rebellious behavior, which included a refusal to take an examination because he felt that his teachers were not qualified to judge him. However, during this time he perfected his meticulous drawing technique by emulating the 17th-century Dutch still-life masters and 19th-century French and Spanish genre painters. Dalí’s paintings had attracted attention in student exhibitions, and in 1925 he had a successful one-man show at a Barcelona gallery.

In his early work Dalí was influenced by the abstract art of his compatriots Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and he experimented with various avant-garde styles, including cubism. After 1928 he returned to an earlier interest in the so-called metaphysical painting of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The strong concern of the metaphysical painters with the evocative power of symbols suggested deliberate investigation of dream imagery according to the principles of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Dalí’s precise realistic technique was admirably suited to the creation on canvas of the hallucinatory atmosphere of dreams.

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III

Surrealist

In 1929 Dalí moved to Paris and became officially a surrealist. That year he made the first surrealist film, Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), in collaboration with director Luis Buñuel. The film shocked audiences with such images as a razor slicing an eyeball. Also in 1929 Dalí had a one-man show in Paris, from which every work was sold. The preface to the exhibition catalogue was written by André Breton, the founder of surrealism, and it marked Dalí’s formal membership in the group.

During the 1930s Dalí painted the majority of the works for which he is now most famous. These include some of the most celebrated surrealist images, such as the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In contrast to the usual surrealist preoccupation with the phenomenon of unconscious thought, Dalí insisted on a more consciously objective presentation of the experience of paranoid obsession. He depicted with great precision familiar objects in illogical settings and combinations, describing his paintings as “handmade dream photographs” and his technique as the “paranoiac-critical method.” Many of his paintings make use of repeated imagery—the multiple watches of The Persistence of Memory, for example—and of shapes that metamorphose, or turn into other objects, and are therefore open to multiple interpretations.

Like many of the surrealists, Dalí quarreled with Breton, and in 1939 he was officially expelled from the movement. By this time he was in any case moving away from surrealism to a more naturalistic style, influenced by his admiration for Renaissance art, which he saw on visits to Italy. In 1940 Dalí left war-torn Europe and moved to the United States, where he remained until 1948. In addition to paintings, he created sets and costumes for several ballets, made handcrafted jewelry, and produced a quantity of commercial illustrations that brought him financial success. He even contributed a dream sequence to the movie Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

IV

Later Years

In 1948 Dalí returned to Spain. From this time he lived mainly at Port Lligat, near his birthplace, but he often visited New York and Paris. His later paintings are more realistic in style and often feature his wife and muse, Gala. He also painted works on religious themes, including Crucifixion (1954, Metropolitan Museum, New York City) and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Although his later works were disliked by many critics, they were widely reproduced and became popular with the public.

A flamboyant and controversial figure, Dalí remained newsworthy until the end of his life. The second volume of his autobiography, Diary of a Genius, appeared in 1965. He died in Figueres at the age of 84 and is buried there in the Dalí Museum that he had helped establish in 1974. Another museum dedicated to his work is in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

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