Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domènech, Marquis of Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a Spanish (Catalan) surrealist painter.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931.
Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003.
Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Dalí insisted on his "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in the year 711, and attributed to these origins, "my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes."
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.
Early life
Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:47 am GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis, nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinarian approach was tempered by his housegirl (Dalí's mother), Felipa Domenech Ferres, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said: "… [we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."
Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years his junior. In 1949 she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers, Sagibarbá and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.
Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.
In February 1921, Dalí’s mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her … I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dalí’s father married his deceased wife’s sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage as some do think, because he had a great love and respect toward his aunt.
Madrid and Paris
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and there studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. A lean 1.72 m tall dandy, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee breeches in the fashion style of a century earlier. But his paintings, where he experimented with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works, he probably did not completely understand the movement, since his only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalogue given to him by Pichot, and there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time.
Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life. At the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, he became close friends with the poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he might have become romantically involved, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
Dalí was expelled from the academy in 1926 shortly before his final exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented by that time in his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in 1926. That same year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered; Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dalí from Joan Miró. Dalí did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró over the next few years as he moved toward developing his own style.
Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences of all styles of art he could find and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant-garde, sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention and mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.
Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was influenced by that of seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.
1929 until World War II
In 1929, Dalí collaborated with the surrealistic film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). He was mainly responsible for helping Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also that year he met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Helena Dmitrievna Deluvina Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior who was then married to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years). The surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, the work introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape and the ants and fly devouring the other watches.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony (They remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958).
He became a friend to the historian and scientist Alexandre Deulofeu, also born in Empordà as himself.
Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934, and the exhibition of Dalí works (including Persistence) in New York created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dali Ball". He showed up wearing on his chest a glass case containing a brassiere.
In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques was delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind.
When Francisco Franco came to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí was one of the few Spanish intellectuals supportive of the new regime, which put him at odds with his predominantly Marxist surrealist fellows over politics, eventually resulting in his official expulsion from this group. At this, Dalí retorted, "Le surréalisme, c'est moi." André Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dalí), which more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which he referred to Dalí after the period of his expulsion; the surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead. The surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond. As World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States in 1940, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
Later years in Catalonia
Starting in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and many other artists. As such, it is probable that at least some of the common dismissal of Dalí's later works had more to do with politics than the actual merits of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton organized an exhibit called, Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the Fortieth Anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.
Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists like Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important influence on pop art. Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s when he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns, signifying divine geometry (as the rhinoceros horn grows according to a logarithmic spiral) and chastity (as Dalí linked the rhinoceros to the Virgin Mary). Dalí was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube; the latter, a 4-dimensional cube, is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).
Dalí’s post-World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science and religion. Increasingly Catholic, and inspired by the shock of Hiroshima, he labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism". In paintings such as The Madonna of Port-Lligat (first version) of 1949 and Corpus Hypercubus, 1954, Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. “Nuclear Mysticism” included such notable pieces as La Gare de Perpignan, 1965, and Hallucinogenic Toreador, 1968–1970.
In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s. He found time, however, to design the Chupa Chups logo in 1969. Also in 1969, He was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, and created a large metal sculpture, which stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
In the television programme Dirty Dalì: A Private View broadcast on Channel 4 on 3 June 2007, the art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with Salvador Dali in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.
In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Dalí the title Marquis of Pubol, for which Dalí later paid him back by giving him a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed.
Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself—possibly as a suicide attempt, possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation, as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear circumstances—possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí was rescued and returned to Figueres where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum for his final years.
There have been allegations that his guardians forced Dalí to sign blank canvasses that would later (even after his death) be used and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dalí. He died of heart failure at Figueres on January 23, 1989 at the age of 84, and he is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres.
