Salvador Dalí

• 1. Introduction

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  Salvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904, at 8:45 in the morning, in a house on Carrer Monturiol in the Catalan town of Figueres. He arrived into a family already shadowed by loss. His older brother, also named Salvador, had died nine months earlier, before the future artist ever drew a breath. That ghost would follow Dalí his entire life. He mythologized his dead brother in writing and in paint, describing him as "probably the first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."

  By the time Dalí died on the 23rd of January 1989, he had produced over 1,600 paintings, collaborated with Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney, designed a logo for a lollipop brand, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine at age 32. He had been expelled from the Surrealist group, expelled from his own father's home, and awarded a Spanish marquisate by a king.

  What made Dalí the figure he became? How did a boy in a Catalan fishing village grow into one of the most recognized artists of the twentieth century? And what sits at the center of all those melting watches, lobster telephones, and rhinoceros horns?

• 2. The Shape of a Young Artist

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  Figueres sits close to the French border, and the Dalí family's world was larger than its size might suggest. Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris, took the young Salvador on a summer holiday to the resort town of Cadaqués in 1916, and that trip introduced the boy to modern painting. The following year, Dalí's father organized a home exhibition of his son's charcoal drawings. In 1918, when Salvador was fourteen, he had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres, the very building he would later transform into his most personal monument.

  His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferrés, encouraged those artistic endeavors against the grain of a household run by a strict notary father. When she died of uterine cancer on the 6th of February 1921, Dalí was sixteen. He later said her death was "the greatest blow I had experienced in my life."

  In 1922, Dalí arrived at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he stood out immediately: lean at 1.72 meters, with long hair, sideburns, and knee-breeches cut in the manner of English aesthetes from the late nineteenth century. He began visiting the Prado every Sunday, pencil in hand, studying the old masters. Raphael, Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Vermeer became his classical anchors. At the same time, his Cubist experiments drew more student attention than anything else in Madrid, because no Cubist artists existed there yet.

  At the Residencia he befriended Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, and the poet Pepín Bello. The friendship with Lorca carried what Dalí called a strong element of mutual passion, though he said he rejected the poet's sexual advances. Lorca's execution by Nationalist forces in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War would return in Dalí's art and writing for the remainder of his life.

• 3. Surrealism and the Paranoiac Method

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  At the Autumn Salon in Barcelona in October 1927, two Dalí paintings stopped critics cold: Honey is Sweeter than Blood and Gadget and Hand. Dalí described the first as "equidistant between Cubism and Surrealism". The works already carried the ingredients that would define his most famous period: dreamlike images rendered with precise draftsmanship, landscapes unmistakably Catalan, and a private iconography of rotting donkeys and dismembered bodies.

  In 1929, Dalí collaborated with Buñuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou. Its opening image of a human eyeball being slashed with a razor announced that Surrealism was not simply a painting style but a method of assault on the viewer's assumptions about what could be shown.

  That same August, Dalí met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a Russian immigrant ten years his senior then married to Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. The encounter reoriented his life. He officially joined the Surrealist group in Paris later that year, in the Montparnasse quarter. André Breton described the eleven works in Dalí's first Paris exhibition at the Goemans Gallery as "the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now."

  The tool Dalí contributed to Surrealism was what he called the paranoiac-critical method: a way of deliberately inducing hallucinatory states while remaining conscious enough to paint their contents with the precision of an old master. One critic, reviewing his work at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris, described him as "a paranoiac of geometrical temperament". When The Persistence of Memory appeared in the June 1931 exhibition at the same gallery, it attracted the most attention of any work on display. The soft watches, Dalí later said, came to him while contemplating a piece of Camembert cheese.

• 4. Expulsion and America

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  Dalí's expulsion from his father's home on the 28th of December 1929 came after Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had exhibited a drawing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." When his father demanded a public recantation, Dalí refused and was disinherited. The following summer he and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin at Port Lligat, a bay near Cadaqués, and began building the house that would remain his base for decades.

  In November 1934, Dalí made his first trip to the United States. The press coverage was widespread. He delivered three lectures on Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, telling audiences for the first time: "The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad." The heiress Caresse Crosby organized a farewell ball on the 18th of January 1935; Dalí wore a glass case on his chest containing a brassiere.

  His London International Surrealist Exhibition lecture in 1936, titled Fantômes paranoiacs authentiques, was delivered while he wore a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and nearly suffocated before the helmet was unscrewed. He explained he simply wanted to show that he was "plunging deeply into the human mind."

  On the 14th of December 1936, Dalí, aged 32, appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

  André Breton formally announced Dalí's expulsion from the Surrealist group in the May 1939 issue of the magazine Minotaure, citing Dalí's politics and his paranoiac-critical method as a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. In 1949, Breton coined the nickname "Avida Dollars," an anagram of "Salvador Dalí."

  When World War II broke out, the Dalís were stranded in France. On the 20th of June 1940, Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued them visas in Bordeaux. They crossed into Portugal and sailed from Lisbon to New York on the Excambion in August 1940, beginning eight years in the United States.

• 5. Nuclear Mysticism and the Later Work

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  In March 1938, Stefan Zweig arranged for Dalí to meet Sigmund Freud. As Dalí sketched his portrait, Freud whispered, "That boy looks like a fanatic." Freud wrote to Zweig the next day that the meeting had changed his view of the Surrealists entirely, and that he found Dalí's technical mastery genuine. Dalí was delighted by both verdicts.

  After the war, Dalí returned to his house at Port Lligat in 1948 and announced a return to the Catholic faith. The fusion he then pursued, which he called Nuclear Mysticism, joined Einsteinian physics, Catholic iconography, and classical painting technique in a single frame. He showed a study for The Madonna of Port Lligat to Pope Pius XII during an audience arranged to discuss his marriage to Gala. In paintings such as Christ of Saint John of the Cross and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, fragmented atomic particles replaced the solid surfaces of his Surrealist work.

  Images of DNA strands appeared in his canvases from the mid-1950s, alongside the rhinoceros horn shapes he returned to repeatedly. Dalí held that the rhinoceros horn signified divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He connected it simultaneously to chastity, to the Virgin Mary, and to overt sexuality, a range of associations he treated as entirely consistent.

  In 1958, he wrote in his Anti-Matter Manifesto: "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics have transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

  In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, the building where he had held his first public exhibition as a teenager. It would become his largest single project, opening in 1974 after fourteen years of work. He continued adding to it through the mid-1980s.

• 6. The Public Persona

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  In 1955, Dalí arrived at the Sorbonne to deliver a lecture in a Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflowers. In 1939, after changes were made to his window display for the New York department store Bonwit Teller, he pushed a display bathtub through a plate glass window. At the premiere of a Joseph Cornell film in 1936, he knocked over the projector in a rage, claiming Cornell had stolen an idea from him.

  These were not impulsive acts. Dalí understood his eccentricities as a form of performance that was inseparable from his art. The long cape, the walking stick, the haughty expression, and the upturned waxed mustache, cultivated in homage to the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez, became a recognizable image across television in Spain, France, and the United States. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on the 7th of January 1963, and on the panel show What's My Line?. He frequently appeared in public with his pet ocelot Babou and an anteater.

  By 1966, critics were openly arguing that his self-promotion had eclipsed his art. André Breton's "Avida Dollars" epithet, coined years earlier, had become common currency. Yet the Director of Exhibitions and Publications at MoMA had noted as early as 1941 that, whatever the conduct, "the greater part of his art is a matter of dead earnest."

  In 1969, Dalí designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops. The following year he facilitated the advertising campaign design for the Eurovision Song Contest and created a large metal sculpture for the Teatro Real in Madrid.

• 7. Gala, Púbol, and the Final Years

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  Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, and Dalí had lived together since 1929 and married civilly on the 30th of January 1934 in Paris. They remarried in a Church ceremony on the 8th of August 1958 at Sant Martí Vell. Gala acted as his business manager, steering their extravagant lifestyle clear of insolvency while herself engaging in extra-marital affairs Dalí is said to have tolerated. The composer Xavier Benguerel later set their relationship, which the source describes as "tense, complex and ambiguous" and which lasted over fifty years, in an opera titled Jo, Dalí.

  In 1968, Dalí bought the Castle of Púbol for Gala. From 1971 she retreated there for weeks at a time; Dalí agreed not to visit without her written permission. His fear of abandonment deepened through the 1970s. In 1980, at age 76, his health deteriorated sharply, and he was treated for depression, drug addiction, and Parkinson-like symptoms, including a severe tremor in his right arm.

  Gala died on the 10th of June 1982, at the age of 87. Dalí moved into the castle at Púbol where she was buried. That same year, King Juan Carlos bestowed on him the title of Marquess of Dalí de Púbol. What was said to be his last painting, The Swallow's Tail, was revealed in May 1983, a work based on the mathematical catastrophe theory of René Thom.

  From early 1984, Dalí refused food. A fire broke out in his bedroom in August 1984, and he was hospitalized with severe burns. After his release, he moved to the Torre Galatea, an annex to his Theatre-Museum in Figueres. On the 5th of December 1988, King Juan Carlos visited him in hospital; Dalí gave the king a drawing called Head of Europa, which would be his final work. On the morning of the 23rd of January 1989, Dalí died of cardiac arrest. He is buried in the crypt below the stage of the Theatre-Museum, 450 meters from the house where he was born, and across the street from the church of Sant Pere where he had been baptized.