Salvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904, eight months after his older brother, who had died of gastroenteritis on the 1st of August 1903. The family named the newborn Salvador to honor the dead child, creating a psychological burden that would haunt the artist for the rest of his life. Dalí later wrote that he and his dead brother were like two drops of water with different reflections, and he often felt he was merely a second version of the first, conceived too much in the absolute. This obsession with his predecessor manifested in his art through recurring images of the dead brother, such as in the 1963 painting Portrait of My Dead Brother. The trauma of losing his mother to uterine cancer in 1921, when he was only 16 years old, compounded this early grief. He described her death as the greatest blow he had experienced, stating that he worshipped her and could not resign himself to the loss of a being who made invisible the unavoidable blemishes of his soul. The death of his mother left a void that his father tried to fill by marrying his aunt, a decision Dalí accepted with love and respect, yet the shadow of the dead brother remained a central, haunting figure in his psyche and creative output.
The Paranoiac Critical Method
In 1929, Dalí officially joined the Surrealist group in Paris, bringing with him a revolutionary technique he called the paranoiac-critical method. This process allowed him to access the subconscious and create hallucinatory images with the precision of a classical master. His first major Paris exhibition at the Goemans Gallery in November 1929 featured eleven works that André Breton described as the most hallucinatory produced up to that time. The method involved inducing a self-induced paranoid state to interpret reality in multiple ways simultaneously, resulting in double images and optical illusions. One of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, completed in August 1931, depicted soft, melting pocket watches that rejected the assumption that time was rigid or deterministic. The painting also included ants devouring a limp watch, suggesting decay and the passage of time. Dalí's technical skill was so precise that critics began to call him a paranoiac of geometrical temperament. He continued to refine this method, producing works like The Great Masturbator and The Lugubrious Game, which explored themes of sexual anxiety and unconscious desires. His ability to combine dreamlike imagery with academic precision set him apart from his Surrealist peers, who often favored automatism and random processes.The Expulsion From Surrealism
The relationship between Dalí and the Surrealist group deteriorated rapidly after 1934, culminating in his expulsion in 1939. While many Surrealists aligned themselves with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous stance, refusing to denounce fascism. In 1934, André Breton accused him of defending the Hitler phenomenon, a claim Dalí rejected by stating he was Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention. The final straw came when Dalí's father read a newspaper report that his son had exhibited a drawing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ with the inscription Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait. Outraged, his father demanded a public recantation, which Dalí refused, leading to his violent expulsion from his paternal home on the 28th of December 1929. His father disinherited him and forbade him from ever returning to Cadaqués. The conflict with the Surrealists intensified when Dalí publicly supported the Francoist regime after the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Breton announced Dalí's expulsion, claiming he had espoused race war and that his paranoiac-critical method was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. Breton coined the derogatory nickname Avida Dollars, an anagram for Salvador Dalí, to mock his increasing commercialization and self-aggrandizement. This expulsion marked a turning point, as many Surrealists broke off relations with him, leaving him to forge his own path in the art world.