Biography

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 at Figueras (Catalonia). He was the son of a prosperous notary and spent his youth in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built a studio for him. He showed talent for painting as a young man and attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid.

It was through magazines and publications that Dali, while still in Spain around 1927, discovered surrealism. In 1929 he arrived in Paris and shortly became part of the Paris Surrealist Group led by Andre Breton. In 1930 Dali met Gala Eluard, married to the poet Paul Eluard, and Gala was to become his lifetime companion and muse for Dali's artwork.

Dali influenced the scene with his personal flavor of surrealism. The basis of Dali's Work was a personally inspired system which he called the ‘Paranoiac Critical' method. This method which Dali explained in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (1930) is, he wrote, ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretative-critical association of delirious phenomena.' This method was really an extension of Dali's own fevered personality, the nature of which he summed up when he said, at an opening on an exhibition of his in work in 1934, ‘The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.'

Dali's painting, Persistence of Memory (1931) is one of the best known surrealist works. He did not maintain a relationship with the Paris Surrealists for long due to personality clashes and differences in politics. In 1934 he was officially expelled from the Paris Surrealist group, but he continued to exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade.

1939 he moved to Del Monte, California. From 1949 to 1950 Dali's art went through a MysticalInPeriod which was followed by a Nuclear Period. He called this period his “classical” style in which he was preoccupied with science, history, and religion. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali a major exhibition in 1941. He made The Sacrament of the Last Supper which is now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington D.C.

In 1974 Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in Figures, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dali's health began to fail. He lived as an invalid near his Teatro Museo and died on January 23, 1989.