Biography of Salvador Dali | Spanish painter.

(Figueres, Girona, 1904 - Púbol, 1989) Spanish painter. Salvador Dali was born in one morning in the spring of 1904 in a bourgeois family, son of a notary well-intended and a sensitive Lady fond of birds. Would later write: "to the three years wanted to be a chef. The five I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambition has not done more to grow and is now the reach be Salvador Dali and nothing more. On the other hand, this is very difficult, since, as I get close to Salvador Dalí, he moves away from me".

Since persecution would be incessant and the objective there would be never reached and given in any bend of his biography was provided that he found the balance and peace, decided to be excessive at all, many construed characters and sublimate their anguish in a plurality of humorous and sordid delusions. Defined himself as a "perverse Polymorph, lagging and days", "soft, weak and repulsive", but to conquer this laborious advertising image before there save some initiation tests, and if the favorite of his childhood game was wearing the costume of King, already into its ten years, when painting the sick child, explores the advantages of pretending a fragile and nervous Constitution.

Salvador Dali

His precociousness is surprising: at the age of twelve to see the style of the French Impressionists and is made Impressionist, at fourteen she has already locked knowledge with the art of Picasso and been Cubist and the fifteen has become editor of the magazine Studium, where draw brilliant pastiches for the section titled "The great masters of painting".

In 1919 he abandoned his native Catalonia and moved to Madrid and entered the Academy of fine arts becomes friend of the great poet from Granada, Federico García Lorca and the future surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who however step back permanently in 1930. In the capital adopts a special attire: wears long hair, a disproportionately large tie and a coat that drags to the feet. He sometimes wears a sky blue shirt, decorated with Sapphire cufflinks, attaches the hair with a hair NET and polishes it with varnish for oil. It is difficult that his presence goes unnoticed.

In the scrambled and conflicting months of 1923 he suffered an unfortunate setback. At the Academy of fine arts to which it is attached are produced demonstrations against a teacher, and until the official discourse give start and unleashed the violent controversy, Salvador leaves the room. The authorities believe that with this gesture has been he who has given the signal of attack and rebellion and decided to expel him for a year. Then again in Figueras, the guards come to arrest him and he spent a season in jail.

Out of prison, he will receive two joys. The first, a press to print his father gives him, and the second, the visit of its excellent companion of the students residence of Madrid Federico García Lorca, who, in the night of the summer in Cadaqués, reads all the Dali family his verses and dramas just compounds. It is there, next to the Mediterranean, where Garcia Lorca writes the famous "Ode to Salvador Dalí", published a few years later, in 1929, in the Revista de Occidente. Also will soon be Luis Buñuel who reach Cadaqués to work with his friend Salvador in a screenplay absolutely atypical and that will result in a film as strange as it is the Andalusian dog.

In 1927 Dali traveled first to Paris, but is the following year when he settled in Paris and joins the surrealist group led by the poet André Breton. The latter will end driving movement some years later, in a memorable session of prosecution to which Dalí appeared covered with a blanket and a thermometer in his mouth, pretending to be fictitiously suffering fever and oppressive judgment thus becoming a ridiculous farce.

The triple indictment which had then faced Dali was: flirting with fascism, to demonstrate a delirious Catholicism and feel a boundless and irrepressible passion for money. This precisely mentioned in the famous anagramatico nickname with which was nicknamed by Breton, Avida dolars, charge that far from displeasing to the painter provided a secret and ironic pleasure. In fact, after learning to what would become his muse and companion throughout his life, Gala, then still wife of another surreal, the poet Paul Eluard, Dali said romantically: "I love Gala rather than my mother, more than my father, rather than to Picasso and more, even that money."

Salvador fell Gala in the summer of 1929 and it enjoyed for the first time of the honeys of eroticism. This is the period in which he painted adequacy of desire, illumined pleasures and the great masturbator, painting this last which was attacked and torn apart by the fanatical Puritan group the Camelots du Roy. During an exhibition of his works at the Gallery Goemans in Paris, the young and passionate couple takes refuge and isolates himself in the French Riviera, passing the days and nights locked in a small room of a hotel with the closed shutters.

Dali, an eccentric genius

Heard the father of Salvador of the dissolute life of his son from an article by Eugenio D'Ors appeared in La Gaceta Literaria, breaks relations with its stem; but it should not affect it too, or perhaps Yes, since it is at that time that the artist makes the best of his work, like the famous picture persistence of memory (1931), where soft watches hang from the branch of a tree, the edge of a pedestal and a mysterious shape lying in the vast expanse of the beach.

In 1934 he traveled with his already inseparable Gala to United States, where it landed and presented to journalists with a huge bread baked by the Cook of the ship that transported them. In its erratic expressions does not hesitate attaching the Hitler myth with the phone and Lenin with the baseball. They are all absurd jokes trying to remove iron to a threatening political situation. Two years later breaks the vicious civil war in Spain and one of the first signs of the honesty of the military rebels is the infamous murder of his friend Federico García Lorca, crime that shocked international public opinion. Dali wrote: "Lorca had personality to give and sell enough to be shot, before any other, by any Spanish."

In 1938 he finally met, thanks to the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, who had been the great INSPIRER of the surrealist aesthetics, which Dali not feel marginalized despite the bluster of Breton, but instead is considered the unique and most genuine exponent. The father of the psiconalisis had given fuel to the new investigation of the unconscious with his book the interpretation of dreams (1900), but never had taken too seriously his young fans of Paris.

However, on July 20, 1938, after the meeting, Freud noted in his diary: "until then I felt tempted to consider the surrealists, which apparently I have chosen as patron saint, like integral locos (say 95%, as pure alcohol). That Spanish young, with their splendid eyes of fanatic and undeniable technical mastery, moved me to reconsider my opinion". For its part, the artist made amazing and mind-blowing portrait of the "patron saint" of the Surrealists.

Installed again in New York in 1939, Dali accepts a Commission to decorate a few commercial storefronts. The theme chosen is the day and the night, the first evoked by a dummy who gets into a furry bath and the second by means of coals and black cloths extended, but the direction modifies the decoration without consultation with the author. Dali, wrathful, dumps Astrakhan tub full of water and the spear against the glass of the showcase producing a great uproar and a remarkable blight.

Despite the fact that the American public applauds him the vigor with which has been able to defend intellectual property, is judged by the courts and sentenced to pay damages. Not get complete your next project decorating a pavilion of the international fair of New York, which was to take the significant title of Dream of Venus.

In Spain he returned in 1948, taking up residence in Port-Lligat, and finding all sorts of facilities in the regime of general Franco. The Government even declared that catalan corner that so fascinated the painter "Picturesque site of national interest". For many historians of art the best of his work had already been made and, however, remained her forty years of capricious production and irreducible deification and exhibitionism, with public appearances of the style of which starred in December 1955, when is he showed up at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris to give a lecture in a Rolls Royce with cauliflower. In the artist's life was even founded a Dali Museum in Figueras; This scenic, Motley and strange monument to his proverbial ego is one of the most visited museums in Spain.

During the 1970s, Dali, which had declared that the painting was "a photograph made by hand", was the guarantor of the international hyper-realist style which, emerging from his palette, was no less disturbing than his neat previous inquiry about the unlimited and equivocal oneiric universe. But who more and who less better than his pictures reminds his repulsive moustache slicked, and missing who claims to have seen it at the Liceo, the luxurious Barcelona opera theatre, elegantly dressed in frac and looking in the Pocket, a colorful handkerchief guise, a flaccid tortilla à la française.

In his will, the controversial artist bequeathed much of its heritage to the Spanish State, causing in this way, even after his death, which took place in 1989, after a long agony, new and acrimonious debate. The novelist Italo Calvino wrote that "nothing is more falsifiable than the unconscious"; Perhaps this paradoxical and antifreudiana truth is the great lesson of the creator of the paranoiac-critical method, of that master of the histrionismo and propaganda, that painter runaway and a perfectionist, this virtuoso magician and extravagant citizen who was Salvador Dalí. The prolific crackpot of the Empordà, the Catalan plain swept by the vertiginous North wind that picks up the gentle waves of the Mediterranean Sea in a tortuous and arriscada coast, discovered the art of the mystification and the drill, the lying, the concealment and disguise before even learning to handle his pencil with disparate and sterile dreams accuracy.

Its long existence, stubbornly devoted to torture matter and the canvases with the most evil fruits of his fertile imagination, also remained faithful to a stunning landscape of his childhood: Port-Lligat, a clamped Bay of rocks where the spirit is slow, ora to soar towards the most sublime mysteries, prays to corrupt as the quiet waters. Mystic and Narcissus, Salvador Dali, perhaps one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, developed irresponsibility provocative not in ethics, but in aesthetics, a gloomy aesthetic where the beautiful already is not conceived unless it contains disturbing glare of the sinister. Dali exhibited provocatively intimate circumstances of his life and his thought.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas