Salvador Dalí: Education, Artistic Training, and Surrealist Legacy

Salvador Dalí is celebrated as one of the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20th century, and the most famous Surrealist. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dalí was renowned for his flamboyant personality and role of mischievous provocateur as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity.

Early Life and Artistic Inclinations

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Salvador was born in a small town just outside of Barcelona called Figueres. The Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain, would later become a recurring theme in his surrealist works.

Dalí’s older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12 October 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on 1 August 1903. Dalí was haunted by the idea of his dead brother throughout his life, mythologizing him in his writings and art. Dalí’s parents gave him the same name as his deceased sibling, a fact that profoundly impacted his psyche and later his artistic themes, including his preoccupation with identity and mortality. At an early age he was told that he was the reincarnation of his older brother - a story that planted a multitude of ideas in the young man’s head.

Dalí showed artistic talent from an early age. Both of his parents supported their child’s interest in art. Encouraged by his mother, he began formal art training at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueres. He produced his first ever drawings at the age of 10 years old. He attended the Municipal Drawing School at Figueres in 1916 and also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués 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 1918, a site he would return to decades later. In early 1921 the Pichot family introduced Dalí to Futurism.

However, Dalí’s early life was marked by a significant loss. On 6 February 1921, Dalí's mother died of uterine cancer. At the age of 16, Dali lost his mom to breast cancer, an experience which he considered to be the largest blow he’d ever dealt with in life. Dalí was 16 years old and later said 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 the death of Dalí's mother, Dalí's father married her sister.

Formal Education and Early Influences

In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts). Like many other Spanish intellectuals at the start of the 20th century, Salvador Dalí went to study painting in the San Fernando Art Academy in Madrid and lived in its famous student residence in 1922. This progressive institution invited some of the time’s most brilliant minds to speak or organize exhibitions: Juan Ramón Jiménez, Severo Ochoa, Miguel de Unamuno, Manuel de Falla, Ortega y Gasset, Marie Curie, Louis Aragon, and Le Corbusier would pass through its doors before 1936. He was later enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts, a place where he played around with Pointillist and Impressionist styles.

A lean 1.72 metres (5 ft 7+3⁄4 in) tall, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. Also in 1922, he began what would become a lifelong relationship with the Prado Museum, which he felt was, 'incontestably the best museum of old paintings in the world.' Each Sunday morning, Dalí went to the Prado to study the works of the great masters. Those paintings by Dalí in which he experimented with Cubism earned him the most attention from his fellow students, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. Cabaret Scene (1922) is a typical example of such work. Through his association with members of the Ultra group, Dalí became more acquainted with avant-garde movements, including Dada and Futurism.

In May 1925, Dalí exhibited eleven works in a group exhibition held by the newly formed Sociedad Ibérica de Artistas in Madrid. Seven of the works were in his Cubist mode and four in a more realist style. Later that year he exhibited again at Galeries Dalmau, from 31 December 1926 to 14 January 1927, with the support of the art critic Sebastià Gasch [es]. The show included twenty-three paintings and seven drawings, with the "Cubist" works displayed in a separate section from the "objective" works.

However, Dalí’s tenure at the academy was troubled; he was expelled in 1926 for insubordination, as he famously claimed that no professor was competent enough to examine him. In 1926 Dalí took his first trip to Paris. These were restless years for Dalí: he had his first successful exhibitions, but he was also expelled from the San Fernando Art Academy due to his rebellious personality, which led him to declare that the professors were not sufficiently competent to assess his work. This defiance of authority would become a recurring theme in his life. These were the painter’s formative years: during this time he was like a sponge that absorbed influences from many types of art, from classic academic formalism to the most cutting-edge avant-garde, and he was even capable of mixing them in the same piece of work.

Embracing Surrealism

From 1927, Dalí's work became increasingly influenced by Surrealism. Two of these works, Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1927) and Gadget and Hand (1927), were shown at the annual Autumn Salon (Saló de tardor) in Barcelona in October 1927. Dalí described the earlier of these works, Honey is Sweeter than Blood, as "equidistant between Cubism and Surrealism". In the years following Dali’s removal from his father’s estate, he began to travel a bit more while also beginning to study more traditional forms of painting that drew on the styles of the likes of Jan Vermeer, and Gustave Courbet.

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The works featured many elements that were to become characteristic of his Surrealist period including dreamlike images, precise draftsmanship, idiosyncratic iconography (such as rotting donkeys and dismembered bodies), and lighting and landscapes strongly evocative of his native Catalonia. Influenced by his reading of Freud, Dalí increasingly introduced suggestive sexual imagery and symbolism into his work. Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. In the mid-1920s Dalí grew a neatly trimmed mustache.

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with Surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). It was at this point that he joined film director Luis Buñuel to create something truly new - a film that radically veered from narrative tradition with its dream logic, non-sequential scenes, lack of plot and nod to Freudian free association. Un Chien Andalou recreates an ethereal setting in which images are presented in montaged clips in order to jostle reality and tap the unconscious, shocking the viewer awake. His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts.

In August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. In works such as The First Days of Spring, The Great Masturbator and The Lugubrious Game Dalí continued his exploration of the themes of sexual anxiety and unconscious desires. Dalí's first Paris exhibition was at the recently opened Goemans Gallery in November 1929 and featured eleven works. In his preface to the catalog, 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 was divided. In the same year, Dalí officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris.

Conflicts and Controversies

Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The final straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait". Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on 28 December 1929. His father told him that he would be disinherited and that he should never set foot in Cadaqués again. The following summer, Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He soon bought the cabin, and over the years enlarged it by buying neighboring ones, gradually building his beloved villa by the sea.

While the majority of the Surrealist group had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Most Surrealist artists had positioned themselves toward the left and against the German Nazi government, but Dalí, who considered himself apolitical, refused to publicly denounce the Nazi regime.

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Soon after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, Dalí wrote to Luis Buñuel denouncing socialism and Marxism and praising Catholicism and the Falange. In the May issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, André Breton announced Dalí's expulsion from the Surrealist group, claiming that Dalí had espoused race war and that the over-refinement of his paranoiac-critical method was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. Dalí began to have increasingly intense conflicts with André Breton and his circle due to Dali’s political inactivism. This ideological conflict led to a definitive break with Breton and much of the Surrealist circle of his youth.

Artistic Development and Key Works

In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, which developed a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. Dalí had two important exhibitions at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris in June 1931 and May-June 1932. The earlier exhibition included sixteen paintings of which The Persistence of Memory attracted the most attention. Some of the notable features of the exhibitions were the proliferation of images and references to Dalí's muse Gala and the inclusion of Surrealist Objects such as Hypnagogic Clock and Clock Based on the Decomposition of Bodies. Dalí's last, and largest, the exhibition at the Pierre Colle Gallery was held in June 1933 and included twenty-two paintings, ten drawings, and two objects. One critic noted Dalí's precise draftsmanship and attention to detail, describing him as a "paranoiac of geometrical temperament".

Dalí's first New York exhibition was held at Julien Levy's gallery in November-December 1933. The exhibition featured twenty-six works and was a commercial and critical success. Dalí delivered three lectures on Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and other venues during which he told his audience for the first time that "[t]he only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."

From 1933, Dalí was supported by Zodiac, a group of affluent admirers who each contributed to a monthly stipend for the painter in exchange for a painting of their choice. From 1936 Dalí's main patron in London was the wealthy Edward James who would support him financially for two years. One of Dalí's most important paintings from the period of James' patronage was The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937).

In January 1938, Dalí unveiled Rainy Taxi, a three-dimensional artwork consisting of an automobile and two mannequin occupants being soaked with rain from within the taxi. The piece was first displayed at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by André Breton and Paul Éluard. In March that year, Dalí met Sigmund Freud thanks to Stefan Zweig. As Dalí sketched Freud's portrait, Freud whispered, "That boy looks like a fanatic." Dalí was delighted upon hearing later about this comment from his hero.

In September 1938, Salvador Dalí was invited by Gabrielle Coco Chanel to her house "La Pausa" in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. There he painted numerous paintings he later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in New York. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Dalí debuted his Dream of Venus Surrealist pavilion, located in the Amusements Area of the exposition. It featured bizarre sculptures, statues, mermaids, and live nude models in "costumes" made of fresh seafood, an event photographed by Horst P.

Life in the United States

In 1940 Dalí and Gala traveled to the United States to escape the war that was destroying Europe. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 saw the Dalís in France. Following the German invasion, they were able to escape because on 20 June 1940 they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France. Over the eight years they stayed in the country, Dalí rediscovered his Catholic faith, strengthened his apolitical beliefs, and was greatly prolific in painting, illustrating, and writing. He also had a failed collaboration with Walt Disney, among other activities that blurred the line between art and consumption.

Dalí announced the death of the Surrealist movement and the return of classicism in his exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in April-May 1941. The exhibition included nineteen paintings (among them Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire and The Face of War) and other works. In his catalog essay and media comments, Dalí proclaimed a return to form, control, structure and the Golden Section. The Museum of Modern Art held two major, simultaneous retrospectives of Dalí and Joan Miró from November 1941 to February 1942, Dalí being represented by forty-two paintings and sixteen drawings. In October 1942, Dalí's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí was published simultaneously in New York and London and was reviewed widely by the press. Time magazine's reviewer called it "one of the most irresistible books of the year".

Return to Catalonia and Later Years

Dalí returned to Catalonia in 1949, making him a target once again for criticism from his former colleagues, who accused him of supporting Franco’s dictatorship. Nevertheless, Dalí continued to prosper. In 1980, Dalí’s health began to greatly deteriorate. Parkinson’s disease affected his ability to paint, and Gala’s death in 1982 cast him into a deep depression. In these years, Dalí was again surrounded by controversy when the authorship of his latest works was called into question.

On January 23, 1989 Dalí died of heart failure at age 84. His whole life was a piece of surrealist art; being buried in the crypt of his museum in Figueras, not far from the house where he was born and the church of San Pere, where he was baptized, closed the circle of his life.

Personal Life and Relationship with Gala

Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were civilly married on 30 January 1934 in Paris. They later remarried in a Church ceremony on 8 August 1958 at Sant Martí Vell. In addition to inspiring many artworks throughout her life, Gala would act as Dalí's business manager, supporting their extravagant lifestyle while adeptly steering clear of insolvency. Gala, who herself engaged in extra-marital affairs, seemed to tolerate Dalí's dalliances with younger muses, secure in her own position as his primary relationship. Dalí continued to paint her as they both aged, producing sympathetic and adoring images of her.

Legacy

His work is extensive and touched on many different themes. Salvador Dalí is universally considered one of the most celebrated artists of all time. His fiercely technical, yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures and visionary explorations in film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression. From his personal life to his professional enterprises, he welcomed taking risks and proved how diversified the world can be when you dare to embrace pure, boundless creativity.

From an artistic foundation influenced by the Renaissance masters, Dalí’s scope broadened to become recognized as one of the leaders of the Surrealist movement. As an adult, he lived in nearby Port Lligat with his wife Gala, who became his muse, business manager, and chief inspiration. Many of his paintings reflect his affection of this area of Spain.

There are two major museums devoted to Salvador Dalí's work: the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Dalí Museum, located in the heart of picturesque downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, is home to an unparalleled collection of over 2,400 Salvador Dalí works, including nearly 300 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as more than 2,100 prints, photographs, posters, textiles, sculptures and objets d’art. The building itself is a work of art, including a geodesic glass bubble, nicknamed The Enigma, featuring 1,062 triangular glass panels, a fitting tribute to Salvador Dalí’s legacy of innovation and transformation.

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