Salvador Dalí
The showman of Surrealism.
Dalí painted dream images with the precision of the Old Masters and was as famous for his moustache and his antics as for his art.
Salvador Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueres in Catalonia. An older brother, also named Salvador, had died before he was born, something that, according to Dalí himself, marked him. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and lived in a student residence where he became friends with the poet Federico García Lorca and the film-maker Luis Buñuel. He was expelled from the academy in 1926.
In 1929, together with Buñuel, he made the Surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou, with its famous image of an eye being slit open. That same year he joined the Surrealists in Paris and met Gala, the wife of the poet Paul Éluard. She left Éluard for Dalí, they married in 1934, and she became his muse, model and business partner.
Dalí painted dream images with a precise, almost photographic technique that he had learned from Old Masters such as Vermeer and Velázquez. He called his method paranoiac-critical: he deliberately induced a kind of delusion and double images. The Persistence of Memory of 1931, with melting pocket watches in a desolate landscape on the Catalan coast, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) of 1936, a foreboding of the Spanish Civil War, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Surrealist leader André Breton expelled him from the movement, partly for his political stance and his commercialism, and turned his name into the anagram Avida Dollars, greedy for dollars. Dalí lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948, making advertisements, jewellery and a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. After the war he painted large religious pictures, and he later came to support the Franco regime, which many criticised.
He created his own public persona with upturned moustaches and spectacular appearances. He also designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops. The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres opened in 1974. After Gala's death in 1982 he lived in seclusion, and he died in Figueres in 1989. He is one of the best-known artists in the world and, for many, synonymous with Surrealism.