Conflicts with his teachers.ġ925: First stand-alone exibition of Dalí at the Galery of Dalmau.ġ926-28: Early explorations of the Surrealism. First paintings.ġ918: First small exhibition in the Theatre.ġ921-25: Went to Academy of Arts in Madrid. There are museums devoted to Dalí’s work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.ġ904: Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí was born on May, 11th in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain.ġ917: He started to visit the School of Art.

Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films-Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930)-and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.Īpart from painting, Dalí’s output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity his paintings were often on religious themes ( The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. (My wife and I saw the Alfred Hitchcock film “Spellbound” in 1985 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and we saw this dream that Dali contributed as seen in clip below.)

He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs’ and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax ( The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York 1931). His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream’ space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery.

He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one’s mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia’.

Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Dalí, Salvador (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer.

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