Biography of Salvador Dali

The surreal

May 11, 1904
January 23, 1989
Well assorted cocktail of geniality and surreal and dreamlike worlds delirium, painter, Salvador Dali had a life marked by weirdness from the beginning. Born in Figueras day May 11, 1904-full name is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, Marquis de Púbol-three years after the death of the first brother, the father thought fit to call it likewise, perhaps never to be able to forget the firstborn. A condition some "sick", which certainly benefited the mental balance of the small native Salvador, Catalonia, just a teenager exposes some paintings at the Municipal Theater of his town, enjoying a significant critical appreciation.
In 1921 he enrolled at the Academy of fine arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where he became friends with Director Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico García Lorca. With the latter spends the summer in Cadaqués in 1925. The following year he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, and is expelled from the Academy. His first painting Futurist, Cubist-influenced, and is marked especially by the work of Giorgio De Chirico. In the following years his artistic and intellectual association with Lorca and Buñuel produces works of theatre and film scene, as the two famous film "Un chien andalou" and "l'Age d'Or". Pictorial plane soon his attention is attracted by reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Miro and Tanguy, the masters of the unconscious translated on canvas. In 1929 finally enters the surrealist group and in 1931, together with Breton, processes the "surrealist objects in symbolic function."
But the surrealism of Salvador Dalí is still heavily customized: inspired by De Chirico and saturated with references to Freudian psychoanalysis, is characterized by a meticulous technique, smooth and cold. In 1930 he published "La femme visible", an essay devoted to Gala, his wife since 1929, model and muse for a lifetime. This book marks a new direction of Dalí, that starts to combine academic with a realism almost a frenzy, deforming sometimes macabre. A few years after clashes with the surrealists about painting "the enigma of William Tell", until in 1936 is a first break with Breton's group, which will become final three years later. Meanwhile, Dalí had participated in the international surrealist Exhibition in Paris and Amsterdam. Between 1940 and 1948 lives in New York, along with Gala Éluard, dealing with fashion and design. In these years he exhibited his works at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Miró and contributing, with the design of the scenes, the film by Alfred Hitchcock's "spellbound." American falls at the end of their stay in Europe together with Gala.
In 1949 he continued striking for the cinema, collaborating with Luchino Visconti. In the following decade he exhibited in Italy, in Rome and Venice, and in Washington. In 1961 is staged in Venice the Ballet de Gala, with choreography by Maurice Béjart. There are many exhibits in the following years, in New York, Paris, London, until the important retrospective in Madrid and Barcelona in 1983. Seven years later he exhibited his works at the Guggenheim Museum and stereoscopic in May 1978 he was appointed a member of the Académie des Beaux-Artes in Paris. The following year held a retrospective of Dali at the centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, transferred to the Tate Gallery in London.
On June 10, 1982 dies Gala and in July of that year he was awarded the title of "archese of Púbol" in May 1983 he painted "The swallow's tail", his last painting. In 1984 shows severe burns due to the fire in his room at the castle of Púbol, where it now resides permanently. Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989 in torre Galatea due to apoplexy. In accordance with his will he was buried in the crypt of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueras. In his will leaves all works to the Spanish State and its properties. We organize a posthumous retrospective in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, moved then to the Kunsthaus Zurich.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.