|
 Salvador Dalì was born on May 11, 1904, in the Catalan town of Figueras, near Barcelona. He was given the same name of his brother, who died at the age of 21 months from a case of meningitis, possibly brought on by his father’s blows to the infant’s head. The second Salvador Dalì became a world-renowned Surrealist painter and avatar of the bizarre, with a combination of technical accomplishment, haunting imagery, and thirst for publicity that made him one of the most recognized artists of the 20th century.
Dalì was the son of a rich, atheistic notary and a devoutly Catholic, adoring mother. The artist forged a very close relationship to his younger sister, Ana Maria, who remained his only model until 1929 (rumors exist that the relationship crossed the line into incest). Bored in school, Dalì was expelled at the age of fifteen. This expulsion, though, afforded Dalì more time for private art lessons and for mastering the finer points of classical technique that would become crucial to his "lucid dream" style. In 1921, Dalì won acceptance to the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. There he became the youngest member of an avant-garde circle of students that included the surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, and the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Dalì later collaborated with Buñuel on two notorious Surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. Garcia Lorca soon became a very close friend of Dalì’s (and according to some, possibly Dalì’s lover), spending many holidays at Dalì’s family house in the Spanish beach town of Cadaques. In 1930, however, Lorca and Dalì quarreled violently, and the two reconciled only a year before Lorca’s death in 1936 as a dissident in the Spanish Civil War.
During his years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Dalì spent his mornings painting and drawing. Afternoons were spent dressed as a dandy, drinking in cafés and discussing current avant-garde movements like Dadaism, Futurism, and the newly forming Surrealism. Eventually, Dalì’s eccentricities and political beliefs became too much for the Madrid academy. In 1923, he was expelled from school and even jailed for a month for disturbance of the peace and political agitation. He subsequently returned home to work on his paintings in Figueres and at the family beach house in Cadaques. During these student years, Dalì discovered what would become one of the most important influences on his painting style, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Dalì’s personal take on Freud’s theory of the subconscious became the basis of his so-called "paranoiac-critical method" of painting, by which Dalì discovered or hallucinated images of his own subconscious desires and libidinal urges and painted the results. Dalì called the paintings of this period "hand-painted dream photographs."
As a result of his "paranoiac critical-method, " Dalì achieved his first significant recognition as an artist and soon became identified with the Surrealist movement. In 1925, Dalì had his first one-man show in Barcelona. In 1928, three of his paintings, including Basket of Bread, were shown in Pittsburgh. 1928 also marked his first trip to Paris, where Spanish painter Joan Miró introduced Dalì to the Surrealists, an artistic movement led by the poet André Breton and dedicated, in Breton’s words, to "reuniting the realms of conscious and unconscious experience". Dalì soon became the best-known member of the group, though other members, including Breton, resented the newcomer’s flair for publicity and ultimately tried to expel the Figueras native.
The end of the 1920s marked a crucial point in Dalì’s life. In 1929, he met Gala (née Helena Deluvina Diakinoff), a Russian immigrant eleven years older who was then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. During a summer visit to Cadaques, Gala began a relationship with Dalì that would last over fifty years. The two married in 1934, and Gala became Dalì’s only model and managed all of the artist’s financial affairs, earning herself a reputation as a harpy. At least initially, Gala deserved credit for maintaining order in Dalì’s personal life so that he could concentrate on his art. In 1931, Dalì painted his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks becoming a Surrealist icon. Throughout the 1930s, Dalì’s paintings were including in Surrealist group shows in the U.S. and Europe. These paintings featured wild juxtapositions of animals, objects and biomorphic shapes, usually placed in the harshly lit landscapes of his native Catalan. One buyer astutely commented that Dalì’s titles, like The Lugubrious Game (1929) or Atmospheric Skull Sodomising a Grand Piano (1934), were worth as much as the paintings.
During World War II, Dalì and Gala took refuge in the U.S., returning to Spain only in 1955. As Dalì’s international fame continued to grow, the artist thirstily sought publicity, stating "My motto has always been, ‘Let them speak of Dalì, even if they speak well of him.’" Unfortunately, Gala’s constant demands for money caused Dalì to take on too many commissions, triggering deterioration in the quality and creativity of his work. During his return to Catholicism during the fifties and sixties, Dalì produced a series of large, classically influenced, religious and historical canvases. While these pieces sold well, art critics received the works less enthusiastically than Dalì’s surrealist works. In addition to painting, Dalì also began his kaleidoscopic output of drawings, poetry, a novel (Hidden Faces), an invention-filled autobiography (The Secret Life of Savador Dalì), book illustrations, and designs for jewelry, textiles, clothing, costumes, shop windows, and stage sets.
Beyond artistic endeavors, Dalì and his wife captured the public imagination through their increasingly decadent (and well-publicized) social life in New York, Paris, and several Spanish cities. They hosted surrealist balls that resembled performance art happenings, with food served in shoes, live animals as decorations, and bartenders with ties made of hair. Surrounded by a collection of hippies and freaks called the "Court of Miracles," Dalì and Gala also hosted "sexual cabarets" in European castles, populated by transvestites, young girls, and dwarfs. Gala, pushing seventy, topped off this excess by having an extended affair with a man who played Jesus Christ Superstar off-Broadway. Ultimately, Dalì and Gala’s need for more and more money to support their outrageous lifestyle led to "The Dalì Scandal" of the 70s. During these years, Dalì signed several contracts for the reproduction of paintings created many years prior. In addition, he put his name on many other articles besides paintings and prints, the most extreme example being a set of Tarot cards for which he signed over 17,500 copies. These actions ultimately prompted a revaluation during the 1980s of the many Dalì prints on the market.
In 1974, Dalì opened the Teatro Museo Dalì in Figueres. Retrospectives in Paris and London followed at the end of the seventies, paying tribute to Dalì’s life accomplishments as a painter. After Gala's death from heart failure in 1982, Dalì's slipped in and out of sanity and almost completely stopped eating. During the last years of his life, the artist lived in seclusion, receiving almost no visitors (exceptions were the King and Queen of Spain) and receiving medical help from private nurses. On January 23, 1989, Salvador Dalì died in a hospital in Figueres from heart failure and respiratory complications.
Click to buy Dali posters here!
Click to buy Dali's (humbly titled) Diary of a Genius
Click to buy Curiger's fascinating book, Hypermental: Rampant Reality 1950-2000: From Salvador Dali to Jeff Koons
|
