Salvador Dali

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, a market town in the Emporda plain of Catalonia, close to the French border ^[1]. His father, Salvador Dali i Cusi, was a strict and prosperous notary; his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres, encouraged the boy's early drawing. Nine months before his birth, an older brother, also named Salvador, had died in infancy. Dali later wrote that his parents took him as a child to the brother's grave and told him he was the dead boy's reincarnation, an episode he treated throughout his life as a founding wound of his identity ^[2].

The family spent summers at Cadaques, a fishing village on the rocky Cap de Creus coast. The bleached light, twisted olive trees, and eroded granite of that shoreline reappear in Dali's paintings for six decades, often as the literal backdrop of his dream scenes ^[1]. He received his first formal art instruction in Figueres and had his first public showing there in 1919, while still a teenager, in a group exhibition at the municipal theatre. That same building, rebuilt after the Spanish Civil War, would eventually house his own museum.

His mother died of cancer in February 1921, when Dali was sixteen. He described her death as the greatest blow of his youth. His father soon married Felipa's sister, a union the painter resented. The following year Dali left for Madrid to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the same academy that had trained generations of Spanish painters ^[2].

In Madrid, Dali lodged at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a liberal college that placed him alongside two other future giants of Spanish culture: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel ^[3]. The three formed an intense, competitive friendship. Dali cultivated dandyish costumes and long hair, experimented with Cubism and metaphysical painting, and gained a reputation for both talent and insolence. The academy suspended him in 1923 and expelled him permanently in 1926 after he declared that no member of the faculty was competent to examine him ^[1].

Expulsion cost him nothing. That same year he traveled to Paris and met Pablo Picasso, whom he admired openly, and by 1927 he was absorbing the ideas of the Surrealist circle around the poet Andre Breton. In 1929 Dali collaborated with Bunuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou, a seventeen minute sequence of shock images, including a famous shot of a razor slicing an eye, that made both men notorious overnight ^[3]. Bunuel and Dali followed it in 1930 with the longer film L'Age d'Or, which provoked riots in Paris.

The summer of 1929 changed his private life as well. Among the visitors to Cadaques was the poet Paul Eluard and his Russian born wife, Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, known as Gala. Dali and Gala began a relationship that scandalized his family; his father expelled him from the household. Gala became his companion, business manager, and obsessive muse, and the couple married in a civil ceremony in 1934 and in a Catholic one in 1958 ^[2]. Formally admitted to the Surrealist group in 1929, Dali developed what he called the paranoiac critical method, a technique of cultivating self-induced delusional associations and then recording them with photographic precision. It gave Surrealism some of its most durable images ^[4].

Any account of Salvador Dali achievements begins with The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931. The small canvas, roughly 24 by 33 centimeters, shows soft pocket watches drooping over a branch, a ledge, and a fleshy form on the beach at Port Lligat. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 1934, and the melting watches became perhaps the single most reproduced image of twentieth century Surrealism ^[5]. Dali said the idea came to him while contemplating a runny Camembert cheese, an origin story he repeated with relish.

Through the 1930s he produced a stream of major paintings, among them The Great Masturbator (1929), Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War (1936), Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), and Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937), the last of which he brought to London in 1938 when he met Sigmund Freud, whose writing on dreams had shaped his whole method ^[4]. His relations with the organized Surrealists soured in the same decade. Breton objected to Dali's refusal to condemn Hitler unambiguously, his fascination with money, and his politics, and the group effectively expelled him in 1934, though he continued to exhibit as a Surrealist. Breton later mocked him with the anagram Avida Dollars ^[1].

Dali's range extended far beyond easel painting. He designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 film Spellbound, collaborated with Walt Disney on the animated short Destino (begun in 1946, completed by Disney studios in 2003), created jewelry, ballet sets, perfume bottles, and the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops, and illustrated editions of Dante and Cervantes ^[3]. After the Second World War he announced a turn toward what he called nuclear mysticism, combining Catholic subjects with imagery from atomic physics. Large canvases of this period, including Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), now in Glasgow, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, remain among his most visited works ^[6].

Gala stood at the center of Dali's adult existence. He signed some paintings Gala Salvador Dali, painted her repeatedly as madonna, muse, and classical figure, and credited her with rescuing him from psychological collapse in the early 1930s ^[2]. The marriage was unconventional. Gala kept her own affairs, and in 1968 Dali bought her a castle at Pubol, in Girona province, agreeing that he would visit only with her written invitation. The arrangement was eccentric even by his standards, and he honored it.

The couple fled Europe in 1940 as German forces advanced through France and spent eight years in the United States, dividing time between New York and California. American exile made Dali rich and famous on a new scale. He published his flamboyant autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, in 1942, wrote a novel called Hidden Faces in 1944, designed department store windows, and appeared on television game shows in later decades ^[1]. Critics who admired his early painting often deplored the showmanship; Dali answered that his exhibitionism was itself part of the work.

His politics drew lasting controversy. Unlike Picasso and most of the Spanish avant garde, Dali returned to Franco's Spain, settling again at Port Lligat in 1948, and made public gestures of support for the regime, including portraits of Franco's granddaughter. Former friends never forgave it, and Bunuel, once his closest collaborator, broke with him permanently ^[3]. Dali described himself in later years as a monarchist and an increasingly devout, if idiosyncratic, Catholic.

In 1974 Dali opened the Teatre-Museu Dali in Figueres, built inside the burned shell of the old municipal theatre where he had first exhibited as a boy. He designed it as a single enormous artwork, crowned with a geodesic dome and studded with giant eggs, and filled it with paintings, installations, and optical illusions ^[7]. It remains one of the most visited museums in Spain. In the same period King Juan Carlos I ennobled him, and in 1982 he received the title Marquis of Dali de Pubol.

His final decade was harsh. Gala died in June 1982, and Dali, already weakened by a trembling disorder that had ended his ability to paint steadily, sank into depression and stopped eating properly. He moved into the Pubol castle, where in 1984 a bedroom fire left him with severe burns. After recovering he lived in rooms attached to his Figueres museum, the Torre Galatea, rarely seen in public ^[1].

The late years also produced a durable commercial scandal. Dali had signed large numbers of blank sheets in the 1960s and 1970s, and unauthorized prints bearing his signature flooded the market, a problem that still complicates authentication of his graphic work ^[3]. Salvador Dali died of heart failure in Figueres on January 23, 1989, at the age of 84. He is buried in a crypt beneath the stage floor of his own museum, a few hundred meters from the house where he was born ^[7].

Dali left an estate and copyrights to the Spanish state, administered through the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, which he had created in 1983. Three sites in Catalonia now form a so-called Dali triangle: the theatre museum in Figueres, the house at Port Lligat, and the castle at Pubol. Across the Atlantic, the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, built around the collection of the industrialist A. Reynolds Morse and his wife Eleanor, holds the largest group of his works outside Spain, including eight of his large scale masterworks ^[8].

Within art history his standing has settled into an unusual shape. Scholars generally rank the paintings of 1929 to 1939 among the essential works of Surrealism, praised for their draftsmanship and psychological invention, while opinion divides sharply on the postwar output and on the effect of his relentless self-promotion ^[4]. Yet the promotion itself now looks prophetic. Dali's manipulation of mass media, branding, and personal image anticipated strategies later associated with Andy Warhol and with contemporary celebrity culture.

Basic Salvador Dali facts, from the melting watches to the upturned mustache modeled on Velazquez, have passed into common visual language, quoted in advertising, album covers, and film. An exhumation ordered by a Spanish court in 2017, to settle a paternity claim that DNA testing rejected, found the mustache still intact, a detail reported around the world ^[9]. Few artists of any century have made their private obsessions so public, or turned a small Catalan town into a place of pilgrimage. That double achievement, pictorial and theatrical, is why a Salvador Dali biography still reads less like a career summary than like one long, deliberate performance.