Salvador Dali was a Spanish artist known for his surrealist paintings, as well as his work in film, sculpture, photography, fashion, and theater. He was born in Catalonia in 1904 and started art school as a child. Dali collaborated with Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, and his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory. He married his muse, Gala, and was expelled from the Surrealist group for his political beliefs. Dali suffered a nervous system deterioration and died in 1989, buried in the crypt of the Dalí Theater and Museum.
Salvador Dali was a 20th-century Spanish artist best known for his surrealist paintings. He has also worked in film, sculpture, photography, fashion and theater and has written a novel, Hidden Faces. He was known for his flamboyant personality and style, such as his flamboyant mustache, as well as his revolutionary art.
Dali was born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech on May 11, 1904 in Catalonia, Spain. When he was five years old, his parents told him that he was the reincarnation of his brother, who died nine months before his birth. Dali would come to share this belief. He also had a younger sister, Ana María. When he was 16, his mother died of breast cancer and his father remarried his sister-in-law.
Salvador Dali started art school as a child, and his father organized an exhibition of the boy’s charcoal sketches at their family home in 1917. He had his first public exhibition two years later. In 1922 Dali moved to Madrid to study at the Academia de San Fernando School of Fine Arts.
At the Academy, Dali befriended the director Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he would later collaborate. He showed considerable talent in his early paintings, experimenting with Cubist and Dadaist styles. The artist was expelled in 1926 after claiming that none of the teachers at his school were fit to examine him. In the same year he went to Paris for the first time and met his idol, Pablo Picasso.
In 1929, Dali and Buñuel collaborated on the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusion Dog), and Dali began to develop a unique surrealist style in his paintings. Perhaps her most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. She also met her muse, Gala, in 1929, shortly after which she moved in with her. The two would have married in 1934 and later, with a Catholic rite, in 1958.
The fame of the artists spread beyond Europe in the following years, with an exhibition in New York in 1934 and one in London in 1936. Dalì’s politics, such as his support for Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War, led to his expulsion from the group of Surrealists led by André Breton. British poet and champion of the Surrealist movement Edward James became her chief patron in the late 1930s.
Dali and Gala lived in the United States during World War II, from 1940 to 1949, after which they moved to the artist’s hometown of Catalonia. He began to experiment with new and varied art forms and methods, and his work began to incorporate more and more optical illusions. In 1945, he collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on a dream sequence in Spellbound and with Walt Disney on a posthumously released animated short in 2003 as Destiny.
The artist suffered a devastating nervous system deterioration in 1980 as a result of Gala, 11 years his senior, regularly feeding him a concoction of drugs that had not been prescribed to him. After his death in 1982, Dali apparently lost his will to live and possibly attempted suicide a few times. He deliberately dehydrated himself and in 1984 his bedroom caught fire from an unknown cause. He spent his last years in relative comfort at the Dalí Theater and Museum in his hometown, and died on January 23, 1989 of heart failure. He is buried in the museum’s crypt, just three blocks from his childhood home.
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