Dalí, Salvador

Dalí, Salvador (1904-1989), Spanish painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, film-maker, and writer. He was one of the leading figures in Surrealism, and his enormous talent for self-publicity made him an international celebrity, but many critics believe that all his best work was produced fairly early in his career.

Dalí was born in Figueras, Catalonia, on May 11, 1904. His father, a notary, was an atheist and his mother was a devout Catholic. An elder brother, also called Salvador, had died nine months before Dalí’s birth, and he later wrote that he identified morbidly with his namesake and had an overwhelming desire for attention. From an early age he showed eccentricity and also talent in art, beginning to paint when he was six. In 1921 Dalí began studying at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid; in 1924 he was suspended for a year for insubordination, and in 1926 he was expelled for his rebellious behaviour, which included refusing to take an examination because he felt that his teachers were not qualified to judge him. By this time his work had attracted attention in student exhibitions and he had already had a successful one-man show (at the Galeria Dalmau in Barcelona in 1925).

In his early work Dalí experimented with various avant-garde styles, including Cubism, but he was also influenced by the meticulous handling of 19th-century genre paintings. By 1929 he was working in a Surrealist style. In that year he made the first Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, with the director Luis Buñuel, and also had a one-man show at Galerie Camille Goemans in Paris, when every piece on show was sold. The preface to the catalogue was written by André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, and it marked Dalí’s formal membership of the group.

During the 1930s Dalí painted the majority of the pictures for which he is now most famous—works in which he used a detailed, realistic technique to create bizarrely imaginative scenes or “hand-painted dream photographs”, as he called them. They include some of the most celebrated Surrealist images, such as The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York), with its melting watches in an eerie landscape. The double images in his paintings, and the different interpretations that could be drawn from a single set of shapes, which he called his “paranoiac-critical method”, were his greatest contributions to Surrealism. He took part in several of the major Surrealist group shows, including the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, during which he performed one of his most outrageous publicity stunts, giving a lecture dressed in a diver’s suit (the helmet became stuck and he almost suffocated).

Like many of the Surrealists, Dalí quarrelled with Breton and in 1939 he was officially expelled from the movement. By this time he was in any case moving away from Surrealism to a more naturalistic style, influenced by his admiration for Renaissance art, which he saw on visits to Italy. In 1940 Dalí left war-torn Europe and until 1948 he lived in the United States, where not only his paintings but also all manner of design work, including a dream sequence for the film Spellbound (1945) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, brought him enormous financial success. In 1942 he published The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the first of several colourful autobiographical books. (A second, Diary of a Genius, followed in 1964.)

In 1948 Dalí returned to Spain. From this time he lived mainly at Port Lligat, near his birthplace, but he often visited New York and Paris. His later paintings often feature his wife and muse Gala and are sometimes strongly sexual, but he also painted religious works, one of the most famous of which is Christ of St John of the Cross (1951, St Mungo Museum, Glasgow). When this picture was bought by Glasgow City Art Gallery in 1952, it became highly controversial because of its alleged sensationalism and what was considered to be the excessively high price (£8,200) that was paid for it. It has subsequently been widely reproduced and has become very popular with the public, although not generally with critics, who often dismiss Dalí’s later work as mere vulgar showmanship. Other religious works of this period include Crucifixion (1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

In old age Dalí became a recluse, but he was a newsworthy figure until the end of his life. He died in Figueras on January 23, 1989, aged 84. Museums dedicated to his work include: Teatre-Museu Dalí, established in Figueras in 1974, the Salvador Dalí Museum, in St Petersburg, Florida, established in 1982; and the Dalí Universe, founded in London in 2000.