Important Notice

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born on 11 May, 1904, and spent his childhood in the town of Figueres, Spain. Dalí also frequently visited his family’s summer home in Cadaques where he had a studio built. Later, he moved to Port Lligat with his wife Gala, and many of his paintings demonstrate his love for her and this area of Spain.

Dalí began his artistic career at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid,...
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born on 11 May, 1904, and spent his childhood in the town of Figueres, Spain. Dalí also frequently visited his family’s summer home in Cadaques where he had a studio built. Later, he moved to Port Lligat with his wife Gala, and many of his paintings demonstrate his love for her and this area of Spain.

Dalí began his artistic career at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he experimented with what he learnt about Cubism and Dadaism. Although he was expelled from the school in 1926, he had achieved popularity, following his first one-man exhibition in Barcelona the year before.

A few years later, the artist’s paintings were exhibited in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928, and then in a solo exhibition in Paris in 1929, the same year that he and his friend, the director Luis Buñuel, collaborated on the short film ‘Un Chien Andalou’. It was in Paris that Dalí met Gala Eluard, then wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, who would become his main muse, featuring in several of his works, and then his wife in 1934.

Both in Spain and France, Dalí was exposed to and deeply influenced by Surrealism, pioneered by the former Dadaist artist Andre Breton. One of his earliest and most famous Surrealist works is the 1931 canvas, The Persistence of Memory. Soon after that he came to be regarded as one of the leaders of the Surrealist movement and was celebrated for his ‘paranoic-critical method’ of tapping the subconscious in his creative process. However, following political disagreements with Breton and the group and a mock ‘trial’, he was expelled from it in 1934.

Following his engagement with Surrealism, Dalí produced several works reflecting a new preoccupation with science and religion, particularly Catholicism, in the 1940s, a phase that came to be known as his ‘classic’ period. Among the best known paintings from this period are The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946), The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959).

During the Second World War, Dalí and Gala were forced to leave Europe, and moved to America, where the dealer Julian Levy had already shown his work in the mid-1930s. The artist was warmly welcomed in the United States, and his eight years there marked a significant period in his career. In 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the first major retrospective of the artist’s work, and in 1942, Dalí's autobiography, titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, was published. Amongst other projects, Dalí also provided concepts and artwork for a sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘Spellbound’. In 1949, Dalí moved back to Catalonia in Spain.

In 1959, the artist’s early works were included with those of Joan Miró, Enrique Tabara and Eugenio Granell in the landmark exhibition ‘Homage to Surrealism’ organized by André Breton to celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the movement.

In the later years of his career, Dali experimented with several unusual media and processes, and many of his works incorporated optical illusions. Between 1960 and 1974 the artist was occupied with the design and construction of his Teatro Museo, a theatre and museum in his home town of Figueres dedicated to his work, which by now spanned several genres and media, including an extensive body of collaborative pieces in film, fashion, photography and architecture.

Towards the end of the 1970s, retrospectives of Dalí’s work were held in Paris and London, and in 1982, he received the title Marquis de Pubol from King Juan Carlos of Spain. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí’s own health began to fail. He moved from Figueres to a castle in Pubol which he had bought for her. Two years later, he was injured in a fire in his bedroom there, and after this episode returned to Figueres.

Dalí died of heart failure on 23 January, 1989, in Figueres, and was laid to rest there in the crypt of his Theatre-Museum.

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