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Salvador Dalí

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   Salvador Dalí
   Dalí, photo by Carl Van Vechten, November 29, 1939
   Born May 11, 1904
   Figueres, Spain
   Died January 23, 1989
   Figueres, Spain
   Field Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture
   Training San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid
   Movement Cubism, Dada, Surrealism
   Famous works The Persistence of Memory (1931)
   Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, (1935)
   Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)
   Ballerina in a Death's Head (1939)
   The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
   Galatea of the Spheres (1952)
   Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954)

   Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, Marquis of Pubol or Salvador
   Felip Jacint Dalí Domènech ( May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known
   popularly as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish artist and one of the most
   important painters of the 20th century. He was a skilled draftsman,
   best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his
   surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the
   influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence
   of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire
   also includes film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with
   Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which
   was released posthumously in 2003. Born in Catalonia, Spain, Dalí
   insisted on his "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors descended
   from the Moors who invaded Spain in 711, and attributed to these
   origins, "my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my
   passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes."

   Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for
   doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked
   those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his
   eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.
   The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and
   many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

Early life

   Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, at 8.45 am local time in the town of
   Figueres, in the Empordà region close to the French border in
   Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador, had died
   of meningitis three years earlier at the age of 7. His father, Salvador
   Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict
   disciplinarian approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech
   Ferres, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five,
   Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he
   was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his
   brother, Dalí said: "my brother died at the age of seven from an attack
   of meningitis, three years before I was born...[we] resembled each
   other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He
   "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the
   absolute."

   Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years his junior. In
   1949 she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His
   Sister.

   Dalí attended drawing school, where he first received formal art
   training. In 1916, Dalí discovered modern painting on a summer vacation
   to Cadaqués (in the nearby Costa Brava) with the family of Ramon
   Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year,
   Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their
   family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal
   Theatre in Figueres in 1919.

   In 1921, Dalí’s mother died of breast cancer when he was sixteen years
   old. His mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my
   life. I worshipped her...I could not resign myself to the loss of a
   being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of
   my soul." After her death, Dalí’s father married the sister of his
   deceased wife; Dalí somewhat resented this marriage.

Madrid and Paris

   In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de estudiantes (Students'
   Residence) in Madrid and there studied at the San Fernando School of
   Fine Arts. Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long
   hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee breeches in the fashion
   style of a century earlier. But his paintings, where he experimented
   with Cubism, earned him the most attention from his fellow students. In
   these earliest Cubist works, he probably did not completely understand
   the movement, since his only information on Cubist art came from a few
   magazine articles and a catalogue given to him by Pichot, and there
   were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time.
   Wild-eyed antics of Dalí and fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris
   on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten
   Enlarge
   Wild-eyed antics of Dalí and fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris
   on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

   Dalí also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout
   his life. At the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, he became close
   friends with the poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he might have
   become romantically involved, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

   Dalí was expelled from the academy in 1926 shortly before his final
   exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to
   examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented by that
   time in his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in
   1926. That same year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with
   Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered; Picasso had already heard
   favorable things about Dalí from Joan Miró. Dalí did a number of works
   heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró over the next few years as he
   moved toward developing his own style.

   Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were
   already evident in the 1920s, however. Dalí devoured influences of all
   styles of art he could find and then produced works ranging from the
   most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant-garde,
   sometimes in separate works and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his
   works in Barcelona attracted much attention and mixtures of praise and
   puzzled debate from critics.

   Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was
   influenced by that of seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego
   Velázquez.

1929 until World War II

   Dalí collaborated with the surrealistic film director Luis Buñuel in
   1929 on the short film Un chien andalou (French for "An Andalusian
   Dog") and met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Helena
   Dmitrievna Deluvina Diakonova, a Russian immigrant eleven years his
   senior who was then married to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. He was
   mainly responsible for helping Buñuel write the script for the film.
   Dalí later claimed to have been more heavily involved in the filming of
   the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. In
   the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and
   officially joined the surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of
   Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by
   surrealism for two years). The surrealists hailed what Dalí called the
   Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater
   artistic creativity.

   In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of
   Memory. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, the work
   introduced the surrealistic image of the soft, melting pocket watch.
   The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches debunk
   the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is
   supported by other images in the work, including the ants and fly
   devouring the other watches.

   Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934
   in a civil ceremony. They remarried in a Roman Catholic ceremony in
   1958.

   In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist
   Exhibition. His lecture entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques was
   delivered wearing a deep-sea diving suit. When Francisco Franco came to
   power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí was one of the
   few Spanish intellectuals supportive of the new regime, which put him
   at odds with his predominantly Marxist surrealist fellows over
   politics, eventually resulting in his official expulsion from this
   group. At this, Dali retorted, "Le surréalisme, c'est moi." André
   Breton coined the anagram "avida dollars" (for Salvador Dalí), which
   more or less translates to "eager for dollars," by which he referred to
   Dalí after the period of his expulsion; the surrealists henceforth
   spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he were dead. The surrealist
   movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue
   to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his
   death and beyond. As World War II started in Europe, Dalí and Gala
   moved to the United States in 1940, where they lived for eight years.
   In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador
   Dalí.

Later years in Catalonia

   Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia starting
   in 1949. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by
   Franco drew criticism from progressives and many other artists. As
   such, probably at least some of the common dismissal of Dalí's later
   works had more to do with politics than the actual merits of the works
   themselves. In 1959, André Breton organized an exhibit called, Homage
   to Surrealism, celebrating the Fortieth Anniversary of Surrealism,
   which contained works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara, and
   Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of
   Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in
   New York the following year.

   Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting but
   experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made
   bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in
   an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions.
   In his later years, young artists like Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an
   important influence on pop art. Dalí also had a keen interest in
   natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his
   paintings, notably in the 1950s when he painted his subjects as
   composed of rhinoceros horns, signifying divine geometry (as the
   rhinoceros horn grows according to a logarithmic spiral) and chastity
   (as Dalí linked the rhinoceros to the Virgin Mary). Dalí was also
   fascinated by DNA and the hypercube; the latter, a 4-dimensional cube,
   is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

   In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home
   town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus
   of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the
   mid-1980s. He found time, however, to design the Chupa Chups logo in
   1969. Also in 1969, He was responsible for creating the advertising
   aspect of the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, and created a large metal
   sculpture, which stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

   In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Dalí the title Marquis
   of Pubol, for which Dalí later paid him back by giving him a drawing
   (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after
   the king visited him on his deathbed.

   Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his
   will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself—possibly as a suicide
   attempt, possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of
   suspended animation, as he had read that some microorganisms could do.
   He moved from Figueres to the castle in Pubol which he had bought for
   Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his
   bedroom under unclear circumstances—possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí,
   possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí was rescued
   and returned to Figueres where a group of his friends, patrons, and
   fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his
   Theatre-Museum for his final years.

   There have been allegations that his guardians forced Dalí to sign
   blank canvasses that would later (even after his death) be used and
   sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late
   works attributed to Dalí. He died of heart failure at Figueres on
   January 23, 1989 at the age of 84, and he is buried in the crypt of his
   Teatro Museo in Figueres.

Symbolism

   Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the
   hallmark soft watches that first appear in The Persistence of Memory
   suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea
   for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he
   was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese during a hot day in
   August.

   The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works, appearing first
   in his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a
   Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian
   Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant to carry an
   ancient obelisk, are portrayed "with long, multi-jointed, almost
   invisible legs of desire" along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled
   with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for
   their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The
   elephant is a distortion in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly
   legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure."...I am
   painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an
   absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am
   making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying
   to paint them honestly. -- Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and
   Surrealism.

   The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the
   prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it
   appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
   Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to
   death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the
   human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud’s house when he
   first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.

   His fascination with ants has a strange explanation. When Dalí was a
   young boy he had a pet bat. One day he discovered his bat dead, covered
   in ants. He thus developed a fascination with and fear of ants.

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