Salvador Dalí
Born May 11, 1904 — Died January 23, 1989
Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter whose technically masterful, hallucinatory canvases — built from dreamlike imagery, visual paradoxes, and meticulous trompe-l'oeil detail — made him the most publicly recognized visual artist of the 20th century. His flamboyant personal style, extravagant self-promotion, and quote-generating eccentricity made him a celebrity in an era before the term applied to artists, while the depth and range of his work ensured that historical reputation far outlasted the spectacle of his public persona.
Catalonia, Early Mastery, and Expulsion from Surrealism
Born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, he was naming himself after his elder brother Salvador who had died nine months before his birth — a psychic wound the artist would explore throughout his career. He showed exceptional artistic ability as a child and trained at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he formed friendships with poet Federico García Lorca and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He was eventually expelled from the school for refusing to be examined by professors he considered unworthy to judge him.
After a trip to Paris in 1926 where he encountered Picasso, and exposure to the writings of Freud, Dalí formally joined the Surrealist movement led by André Breton around 1929. He developed what he called the "paranoiac-critical method" — a technique for generating imagery by deliberately inducing a hallucinatory, paranoiac state of mind — which produced the visual language most associated with Surrealism: impossible perspectives, shifting scale, objects that morph into other objects. He was ultimately expelled from the Surrealist group by Breton in 1934, ostensibly on political grounds though personal rivalries played a role. Breton coined the hostile anagram "Avida Dollars" from Dalí's name, accusing him of selling out; Dalí didn't much care.
Masterworks and the Gala Years
The central relationship of Dalí's life was with Helena Diakonova, known as Gala — a Russian-born woman he met through the Surrealist circle in 1929, who left her husband Paul Éluard for Dalí and became his lifelong muse, business manager, and wife. She was widely credited as the force that harnessed Dalí's chaotic genius into productive output and managed his commercial career with ruthless effectiveness. Dalí credited her with saving his sanity.
His most famous work, The Persistence of Memory (1931) — the small canvas of melting pocket watches draped over surfaces in a dreamscape — became perhaps the most reproduced art image of the 20th century. Other major works include The Elephants, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, and the hallucinogenic bullfighting figures of his later "nuclear mysticism" period, when he combined Surrealist imagery with atomic-age scientific imagery and Catholic devotional themes. He also produced critically significant films with Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou, 1929 and L'Age d'or, 1930), jewelry, furniture, and theater and ballet set designs.
Did You Know?
Dalí was reportedly afraid of grasshoppers throughout his life, and the insect appears in several of his paintings in grotesque contexts, including hidden within the floating face in The Great Masturbator. He claimed the phobia dated from a traumatic childhood incident but never elaborated in detail on what it was.
Legacy and the Theatre-Museum
After Gala's death in 1982, Dalí withdrew into depression and ill health, eventually settling in the castle he had bought for Gala in Púbol, Catalonia, where a fire broke out in 1984 from which he was rescued. He died on January 23, 1989, in Figueres, and was buried under the stage of the Dalí Theatre-Museum he had himself designed and built in the town of his birth — which he described as "the largest Surrealist object in the world." The museum remains one of the most visited in Spain and a monument to one of art history's most singular visions. A comprehensive illustrated survey — Dalí: The Paintings by Taschen — offers the most complete visual catalogue of his output.