Salvador
Dali

Dali was born in the town of Figueres, just outside of Barcelona in 1904. He began drawing lessons aged 10 and was encouraged to pursue art by both his parents, his father even organised an exhibition of Dali’s charcoal drawings at the family home in 1917, followed by a larger show the next year at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres.

He received his formal education at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando from 1922. Here, his eccentric behaviour and fashion sense ensured his notoriety, perhaps more so than the work he was producing, and he was expelled in 1926 for insulting one of his professors. Moving to Paris after this dismissal marked the beginnings of Dali’s real commercial success. Hugely inspired by Cubism and the work of Picasso and Yves Tanguy, Dali exhibited 23 paintings and 7 drawings, both Cubist and ‘Objective’ in style at the Galeries Dalmau in 1927 - to a largely positive critical response.

While his art school paintings were already garnering Dali recognition, particularly due to their impressive realism, his exposure to Surrealism in the later 1920s saw him create some of his first, more notorious, works. He created two films with fellow artist Luis Brunuel in 1929: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. Both were immediately controversial due to their irrationality, overt sexuality, lack of clear narrative (a product of the Freudian method of ‘Free Association,’ that the artists were using) and politicisation - skyrocketing Dali to artistic infamy.

Furthermore, the paintings that Dali produced during this period from 1927 saw him refine his dreamlike painterly style and recognisable motifs. The barren desert backdrop, the study of sexual symbolism, the subconscious and the strange began to permeate his paintings, with Dali describing one of his major works from this year, Honey is Sweeter than Blood, as being 'equidistant between Cubism and Surrealism.'

One of the most famous of Dali’s signature enigmatic, dreamlike surrealist paintings is his 1931 work: The Persistence of Memory, at which point he was fully engulfed in Surrealist ideology. This famous work depicts various clocks and watches melting across the surfaces of an eerily empty desert backdrop. While coherent meaning is almost impossible to prescribe to this work, the suggestion of a morphing of time is clear here. The fleshy creature draped across the centre of the painting is based on Dali’s own profile yet disfigured to the point where it appears monstrous. A crucial element of this work is the undermining of solidity, where physical objects are made limp by the artist’s vision. It is currently held in the New York MoMA.

Alongside The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s later surreal painting Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951) is also one to note. Considered one of the greatest religious paintings of the 20th century, this work came to Dali through what he called a ‘Cosmic Dream.’ It depicts a crucified Christ (though without any nails or blood) in a darkened sky, looking down onto a body of water. The perspective is utterly striking and the extreme angles of the cross show Dali still incorporating the surreal into his more overtly religious works.

The surrounding Catalan mountains provided inspiration for Dali from a young age, remaining a consistent motif across his oeuvre. While he was studying at art school, he also admired the work of classical painters such as Velazquez, who inspired his now-signature curled moustache.

It was Dali’s exposure to the writings of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the late 1920s however, particularly those concerning the erotic or sexual significance of the subconscious, that really shaped his artistic output. This, coupled with his joining of the Paris Surrealist group, who as artists and writers sought to express the true ‘reality’ of the subconscious over reason, led to Dali’s signature creations.

During his later career and his creation of the ‘Nuclear Mysticism’ style, it was the influence of Classicism, science, mysticism and his renewed Catholic faith that guided Dali’s work.

To create the content of his Surrealist works, Dali invented his own ‘Paranoiac-Critical Method’ in the 1930s, as a means of truly allowing his subconscious mind and intuition to guide his creations. Inspired by Andre Breton’s theory of Automatism, Dali would descend into deep, self-induced paranoid states to then paint what he had seen and experienced with fantastic attention to detail. This lends itself to the artist’s own description of his works as 'hand painted dream photographs.'

Dali had an older brother, also called Salvador, who had died 9 months before his birth due to gastroenteritis. Dali’s mother insisted that the artist was a reincarnation of his brother and this is an idea that persisted throughout his childhood and artistic career. Dali recounted that '[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections,' and imagery of his mythologized sibling appeared in works such as Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963).

Dali married his wife and long-term muse Gala in 1934, and while he had enjoyed success during his stint in the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, Dali was expelled from the group that same year due to his apolitical stance regarding the rise of fascist leader Francisco Franco in Spain. He lived in France throughout the Francoist regime and moved to the United States during the Second World War. Here he spent lots of time creating theatre sets and costumes as well as performing self promotional stunts. He moved back to Spain in 1948 and remained there until his death from heart failure in 1989. The iconic Teatre-Museo Dali was established in his hometown of Figueres, during the 60s in his honour, and it now houses the largest collection of Dali works from across his career.

The artist met Surrealist poet Paul Eluard in 1929 while working on his film Andalusian Dog, and Eluard was immediately taken with Dali’s surrealist and artistic vision. The pair became close and Dali’s subsequent Portrait of Paul Eluard, (1929) has since become his most expensive painting to date - selling for $22.5 million at Sothebys in 2011.