Salvador Dalí

Spanish painter

• Born: May 11, 1904
• Birthplace: Figueras, Spain
• Died: January 23, 1989
• Place of death: Figueras, Spain

During an active career that spanned more than six decades, Dalí emerged as the most popular and influential painter associated with the Surrealist movement. He became one of the towering figures of twentieth century art, noted not only for his painting but also for numerous other creative endeavors, including film and literature.

Early Life

Salvador Dalí (sahl-vah-THAWR dah-LEE) was the son of Salvador Dalí I Cusi, a local notary with liberal and republican tendencies, and Felipa, a pious Roman Catholic to whom young Salvador was devoted. Dalí grew up in a comfortable, progressive bourgeois household that encouraged intellectual pursuits. Indulged and spoiled by his adoring parents, Dalí became a temperamental child who delighted in exhibitionist behavior.

Dalí attended public school in Figueras for only a year. His parents subsequently enrolled him at private academies run by religious orders. He early exhibited a propensity for art, producing two oil paintings by the age of ten. A family friend, the Impressionist painter Ramón Pichot, played a key role in encouraging young Dalí to pursue his artistic inclinations. Dalí’s father was also supportive, allowing his son to enter drawing classes conducted by Juan Nuñez in 1916.

Throughout adolescence and into early adulthood, Dalí experimented with a wide variety of styles that were revolutionizing the art world, including Impressionism, pointilism, cubism, and Futurism. As early as 1918, he exhibited works with other local artists at the Municipal Theater in Figueras. The elder Dalí agreed to support his son’s artistic career and decided that his only son should enroll at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he could obtain a diploma to enable him to become a professor of drawing. Dalí entered the academy in 1921.

Life in Madrid profoundly affected the impressionable young Dalí. He became good friends with a group of students and artists, such as the poet Federico García Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who had radical, revolutionary ideas. Dalí rapidly became disillusioned by the traditionalist teaching at the academy and in 1923 was suspended for a year for leading a student walkout to protest the hiring of a new professor the students considered inferior.

Returning home, Dalí was soon arrested and imprisoned for a month because of his suspicious political beliefs. He returned to the academy in 1924, but two years later his continued outrageous behavior resulted in his permanent expulsion. During these years, he deliberately attracted attention with his bohemian attire, long hair, and anarchist ideas. Although not yet committed to a single style, the young Catalan was already displaying the controversial behavior and espousing the daring ideas that made him one of the century’s most exciting artistic figures.

Life’s Work

Despite his expulsions from the academy, Dalí’s career flourished in the 1920’s. In 1922, the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona exhibited some of his works, and in 1925 and 1926 he had successful one-man shows at the same institution. Dalí became a leading figure in the artistic and literary avant-garde circles of Catalonia, frequently contributing articles to many of its journals and papers.

In early 1927, shortly before he began several months of military service, Dalí made his first visit to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso. He also traveled to Holland to view paintings by the seventeenth century master Jan Vermeer, one of his artistic idols. In 1928, Dalí joined several others in publishing Manifest Groc (also known as Yellow Manifesto and The Catalan Anti-Artistic Manifesto), which assailed contemporary Catalan culture for being unmodern. Soon afterward, he made a second trip to Paris, this time accompanied by the painter Joan Miró, who introduced him to many of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement.

Throughout the late 1920’s, Dalí found himself increasingly drawn to Surrealism. As early as 1927, his painting Honey Sweeter than Blood exhibited definite Surrealist tendencies, and subsequent works increasingly reflected themes and concepts associated with the movement. Not until 1929, however, did he formally affiliate with the Surrealists. That year marked Dalí’s first triumphant Parisian show at Göeman’s Gallery and also witnessed the beginning of his lifelong relationship with Gala Éluard, then the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Dalí, who had been in a state of high mental excitement bordering on madness in 1929, fell passionately in love with the vibrant Gala, who thereafter provided him with the stability and emotional support he needed. At the same time, a bitter rift occurred between Dalí and his father, who banished him from the family. Dalí shaved his head and left for a new life in Paris with Gala, who became his constant companion and whom he married in 1958.

For the next several years, Dalí remained at the forefront of the Surrealist movement, gradually becoming its most prominent and flamboyant spokesman. His paintings of this period became filled with disturbing and bizarre images, many of them drawn from his childhood experiences. Never strongly attracted to abstraction, Dalí instead developed a technique characterized by exactitude of detail and remarkable clarity. His stark landscapes were not imaginary but drawn from recollections of his native Catalonia.

Dalí claimed that the purpose of his art was to systematize confusion and discredit the perceived world of reality. In the 1930’s, he perfected what he called his “paranoiac-critical” technique to explain his style. Dalí said his vivid imagery sprang from his hallucinatory power to look at one object and visualize another. This process often resulted in his producing bizarre new interpretations of familiar themes. In Dalí’s imagination, for example, the heroic figure of William Tell became instead threatening and sinister. The paranoiac system made frequent use of multiple imagery, in which one object would be transformed into another as the viewer stared at the painting.

Dalí did not limit his involvement with Surrealism strictly to painting. He created many Surrealist objects, such as his Aphrodisiac Jacket (1936) and a sofa designed in the shape of Mae West’s lips. In 1928, he and his friend Buñuel produced a daring seventeen-minute Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a provocative effort in which both men made appearances. He later collaborated with Buñuel on a second film, L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age), which proved so controversial that Parisian authorities banned it in 1930. Throughout the period, Dalí remained a prolific writer and illustrated numerous works written by other Surrealists. Always eager for publicity, Dalí also delivered important lectures on Surrealism, including one controversial 1936 address at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London, at which he lectured wearing a deep-sea diver’s suit and nearly suffocated.

By this date, however, Dalí’s relationships with his fellow Surrealists had become severely strained. Leaders within the movement, such as André Breton, found many of his actions foolish and unproductive to the movement’s leftist political agenda. Dalí always claimed to be apolitical, but Breton and others accused him of reactionary tendencies and assailed his supposed loyalty to classical and Roman Catholic traditions. Dalí continued to participate in Surrealist exhibitions as late as 1938, but by 1939 the break was complete. He never joined another movement but remained proudly individualistic.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Dalí had to abandon his annual visits to his seaside home at Port Lligat near Figueras. He and Gala made three trips to Italy between 1937 and 1939, where he found himself influenced by the classical tradition of the art he viewed there. In London in 1938, he visited Sigmund Freud, whose Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) had proved a key influence on the development of Dalí’s style.

After the Nazi conquest of France in 1940, Dalí fled to the United States, where he remained until 1948. He already had a substantial reputation in the United States, strengthened by several visits he had made there in the 1930’s. Dalí initially lived at the Virginia estate of his friend Caresse Crosby, where he finished his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). He later acquired a studio in California and kept himself busy during these years painting portraits of society figures, designing scenery and costumes for several ballets, collaborating with various fashion magazines, and writing a novel, Hidden Faces (1944).

Dalí’s style continued to evolve, as new themes and obsessions appeared on his canvases. Deeply affected by the advent of the atomic bomb, Dalí developed a profound interest in nuclear physics an obsession that appeared in some of his works, such as Exploding Raphaelesque Head (1951). Beginning in the late 1940’s, he produced many works on religious themes, one of which he presented to the pope. Large canvases with quasi-historic themes, such as The Dream of Christopher Columbus (1958-1959), became another postwar preoccupation.

By now an international celebrity, Dalí kept abreast of the latest developments in the fast-changing world of modern art. In the 1960’s, he experimented with pop and op art and in the 1970’s produced a series of stereoscopic paintings and holographs. Honored by Spain with important decorations in 1964 and 1982, Dalí was also elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in France in 1978.

Following the death of his wife in 1982, Dalí led an increasingly reclusive life, producing his last canvas in 1983. After sustaining severe injuries in an electrical fire in his home in 1984, he moved to the Galatea Tower of the theater-museum built in his honor in his native Figueras. Plagued by failing health and having to use a wheelchair for mobility, he died in Figueras in January, 1989, and was buried under a great glass dome in the inner courtyard of the Dalí Museum.

Significance

By the time of his death, Dalí had become one of the world’s most famous artists. Many of his paintings hung in the world’s great museums, and the general public embraced his work much more readily than that of many other contemporary artists. Yet although Dalí became most famous for his paintings, they constituted only one facet of his tremendous creative output. Dalí was truly a twentieth century Renaissance man, passionately interested in many fields of learning and artistic expression. At various times, he turned his attention to ballet, photography, film, jewelry design, furniture decoration, interior design, and numerous other endeavors. Writing consumed almost as much of his attention as did painting.

Throughout his colorful life, Dalí remained eager for fame and financial success, both of which he achieved. He expertly used his own eccentricity to publicize his work. Much to the chagrin of many others within the movement, Dalí became the most famous Surrealist painter and one of Surrealism’s most eloquent spokespersons before his final estrangement in the late 1930’s.

Dalí’s paintings and other artistic creations clearly reflected the growing importance of the subconscious on the arts during the modern era. His Surrealist objects influenced later developments in pop art, and his emphasis on exact detail and clarity of line provided an alternative avenue of expression for modern art. The limp watches, swarms of ants, burning giraffes, and haunting landscapes that filled Dali’s canvases clearly showed the world the surprising relationship between the world of reality and the world of illusion.

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn. Dalí and Surrealism. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. A useful monograph, partially based on conversations the author had with Dalí. The book’s topical approach includes subjects such as Dalí’s relations with the Surrealists, his paranoiac-critical method, his films, and his early life. Includes numerous illustrations and a bibliography of works by and about Dalí.

Dalí, Salvador. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí. Translated by Harold J. Salemson. New York: William Morrow, 1976. This book contains recollections that Dalí told André Parinaud, a friend of some twenty years. Written in first person, it contains chapters on Dalí’s father, on Gala, and on his artistic theory and many other topics. Contains a chronological table with major dates in his life as well as his key works.

Descharnes, Robert. Salvador Dalí. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985. This volume by a noted art historian, filmmaker, photographer, and friend of Dalí for more than thirty years provides a brief biography and then concentrates on discussions of forty of Dalí’s major works, all illustrated in color. Includes a select bibliography and numerous other illustrations of Dalí’s life and work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Salvador Dalí: The Work, the Man. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984. The definitive study of the artist, chronologically surveying his life and work in detail. Contains more than eleven hundred illustrations, a selected bibliography of works written by Dalí, principal works illustrated by Dalí, and a survey of his other creative endeavors.

Gómez de Liaño, Ignacio. Dalí. New York: Rizzoli, 1984. This volume by a leading Spanish poet and art critic who knew the artist personally provides a sympathetic discussion of Dalí’s life and style. Includes 139 color illustrations of his work and a useful chronological table of his life.

Lubar, Robert S. Dali: The Salvador Dali Museum Collection. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2000. Contains reproductions of paintings from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Lubar’s text about the artist and his works.

Secrest, Meryle. Salvador Dalí: A Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986. This unauthorized biography by a Guggenheim fellow and journalist provides an objective assessment of Dalí’s career, separating his life from legend. Well researched and documented, it includes a select bibliography and a list of major Dalí exhibition catalogs.

Stuckey, Charles. “The Persistence of Dali.” Art in America 93, no. 3 (March, 2005): 113-149. An overview of Dali’s life and work. Includes illustrations with examples of Dali’s art.