Salvador Dalí
On the 11th of May 1904, a boy named Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres, Catalonia. He arrived at 8:45 am on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol 20. This child carried a heavy burden from his very beginning because an older brother had died nine months earlier on the 1st of August 1903. That dead brother shared the same name and was described by the artist as the first version of himself conceived too much in the absolute. Dalí later claimed that they resembled each other like two drops of water but had different reflections. Images of this lost sibling would reappear throughout his career, including in a painting titled Portrait of My Dead Brother created in 1963.
His father, Salvador Luca Rafael Aniceto Dalí Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer who maintained strict discipline. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferrés, encouraged her son's artistic endeavors with gentle support. In the summer of 1912, the family moved to the top floor of Carrer Monturiol 24. During holidays at the Catalan resort town of Cadaqués, young Dalí played football with future FC Barcelona footballers Emili Sagi-Barba and Josep Samitier. The Municipal Drawing School in Figueres became his training ground starting in 1916. He discovered modern painting during a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.
The death of his mother on the 6th of February 1921 devastated sixteen-year-old Dalí. He stated that it was the greatest blow he had experienced in life. He worshipped her and could not resign himself to the loss of a being on whom he counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of his soul. After her death, his father married her sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage because he had great love and respect for his aunt. This tragedy set the stage for a childhood marked by intense emotional turbulence and early exposure to avant-garde ideas.
In August 1931, Dalí completed one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. It developed a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation suggests these soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. Other images in the work support this idea, such as the wide expanding landscape and other limp watches shown being devoured by ants. Some critics noted that the idea for clocks functioning symbolically came to him when he was contemplating Camembert cheese.
Dalí developed a technique known as the paranoiac-critical method to access the subconscious for greater artistic creativity. The Surrealists hailed this approach as a breakthrough. In November 1929, his first Paris exhibition at the Goemans Gallery featured eleven works. André Breton described Dalí's new work as the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now. The exhibition was a commercial success but the critical response remained divided.
His relationship with his father reached a breaking point over his romance with Gala. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's connection to the Surrealists. The final straw occurred when his father read in a Barcelona newspaper 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, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on the 28th of December 1929. His father told him that he would be disinherited and that he should never set foot in Cadaqués again.
Following the German invasion of France, Dalí and Gala escaped because they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, on the 20th of June 1940. They crossed into Portugal and subsequently sailed on the Excambion from Lisbon to New York in August 1940. The couple lived in the United States for eight years, splitting their time between New York and the Monterey Peninsula, California. Dalí spent the winter of 1940, 41 at Hampton Manor, the residence of Caresse Crosby, where he worked on various projects including his autobiography.
In April, May 1941, he announced the death of the Surrealist movement and the return of classicism in an exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. The show included nineteen paintings among them Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire and The Face of War. Sales however were disappointing and the majority of critics did not believe there had been a major change in his work. On the 2nd of September 1941, he hosted A Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest in Monterey, a charity event which attracted national attention but raised little money for charity.
The Museum of Modern Art held two major retrospectives of Dalí and Joan Miró from November 1941 to February 1942. Dalí was represented by forty-two paintings and sixteen drawings. His work attracted significant attention of critics and the exhibition later toured eight American cities, enhancing his reputation in America. In October 1942, his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, was published simultaneously in New York and London. Time magazine's reviewer called it one of the most irresistible books of the year.
In 1948, Dalí and Gala moved back into their house in Port Lligat on the coast near Cadaqués. For the next three decades they would spend most of their time there spending winters in Paris and New York. He publicly supported Franco's regime and announced his return to the Catholic faith. This decision prompted outrage from many anti-Francoist artists and intellectuals. Pablo Picasso refused to mention Dalí's name or acknowledge his existence for the rest of his life.
In 1949 he painted a study for The Madonna of Port Lligat first version and showed it to Pope Pius XII during an audience arranged to discuss his marriage to Gala. This work was a precursor to the phase Dalí dubbed Nuclear Mysticism. It fused Einsteinian physics classicism and Catholic mysticism. In paintings such as The Christ of Saint John of the Cross and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics.
His later Nuclear Mysticism works included La Gare de Perpignan created in 1965 and The Hallucinogenic Toreador spanning 1968, 70. Dalí's keen interest in natural science manifested by the proliferation of images of DNA and rhinoceros horn shapes in works from the mid-1950s. According to Dalí the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also used optical illusions such as double images anamorphosis negative space visual puns and trompe-l'œil since his Surrealist period.
Immediately after Franco's victory in April 1939, Dalí wrote to Luis Buñuel denouncing socialism and Marxism while praising Catholicism and the Falange. As a result Buñuel broke off relations with Dalí. In the May issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure André Breton announced Dalí's expulsion from the Surrealist group. They claimed that Dalí had espoused race war and that the over-refinement of his paranoiac-critical method was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. This led many Surrealists to break off relations with him.
In 1949 Breton coined the derogatory nickname Avida Dollars an anagram for Salvador Dalí. It served as a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work and the perception that he sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune. When King Juan Carlos visited the ailing Dalí in August 1981, Dalí told him I have always been an anarchist and a monarchist.
In September 1975, Dalí publicly supported Franco's decision to execute three alleged Basque terrorists. He repeated his support for an absolute monarchy adding Personally I'm against freedom I'm for the Holy Inquisition. In the following days he fled to New York after his home in Port Lligat was stoned and he received numerous death threats. His public support for the Francoist regime remained a source of controversy throughout his life.
From the early 1930s Dalí was an enthusiastic proponent of the proliferation of three-dimensional Surrealist Objects to subvert perceptions of conventional reality. Two of the most popular objects of the movement were Lobster Telephone created in 1936 and Mae West Lips Sofa from 1937 which were commissioned by art patron Edward James. The telephone was functional and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his home. Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dalí who drew a close analogy between food and sex.
Between 1941 and 1970 Dalí created an ensemble of 39 pieces of jewelry many of which are intricate some containing moving parts. The most famous assemblage The Royal Heart is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies 42 diamonds and four emeralds created in such a way that the center beats like a heart. He also ventured into industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that he decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.
In theater Dalí designed scenery for Federico García Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda. By the late 1920s he collaborated with director Luis Buñuel on two Surrealist films: the 17-minute short Un Chien Andalou released in 1929 and the feature film L'Age d'Or from 1930. Un Chien Andalou features a graphic opening scene of a human eyeball being slashed with a razor. In 1945 Dalí created the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound but neither Dalí nor the director was satisfied with the result.
Gala died on the 10th of June 1982 at the age of 87. After her death Dalí moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol where she was entombed. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse contributed to depression and failing health. In 1980 at age 76, Dalí's health deteriorated sharply and he was treated for depression drug addiction and Parkinson-like symptoms including a severe tremor in his right arm.
From early 1984 Dalí's depression worsened and he refused food leading to severe undernourishment. On the 23rd of January 1989, Dalí died of cardiac arrest at the age of 84. He is buried in the crypt below the stage of his Theatre-Museum in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere where he had his baptism first communion and funeral.
In November 1988 Dalí entered hospital with heart failure. On the 5th of December 1988 he was visited by King Juan Carlos who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dalí. Dalí gave the king a drawing Head of Europa which would turn out to be his final drawing. There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that could later be used in forgeries. It is also alleged that he knowingly sold otherwise-blank lithograph paper which he had signed possibly producing over 50,000 such sheets from 1965 until his death.
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Common questions
When and where was Salvador Dalí born?
Salvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904 in Figueres, Catalonia. He arrived at 8:45 am on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol 20.
What happened to Salvador Dalí's mother and when did she die?
The death of his mother Felipa Domènech Ferrés occurred on the 6th of February 1921. This event devastated sixteen-year-old Dalí who stated it was the greatest blow he had experienced in life.
Why was Salvador Dalí expelled from the Surrealist group?
André Breton announced Salvador Dalí's expulsion from the Surrealist group in the May issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure. The group claimed that Dalí had espoused race war and that his paranoiac-critical method was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism.
How many rubies are in Salvador Dalí's jewelry piece called The Royal Heart?
The most famous assemblage The Royal Heart is encrusted with 46 rubies along with 42 diamonds and four emeralds. It was created between 1941 and 1970 as part of an ensemble of 39 pieces of jewelry.
When and how did Salvador Dalí die?
Salvador Dalí died of cardiac arrest on the 23rd of January 1989 at the age of 84. He is buried in the crypt below the stage of his Theatre-Museum in Figueres.