La Persistance de la Memoire
by Salvador Dali
Swans Reflecting Elephants
by Salvador Dali
Meditative Rose
by Salvador Dali
Christ of St. John of the Cross, 1951
by Salvador Dali
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Salvador Dali was born in Figueres on May 11, 1904. He spent his childhood between the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain, sixteen miles from the French border and the family's summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Lligat.
In 1917 Dali started to visit the School of Art and in 1925 he attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and in the same year held his first one-man show in Barcelona while he was in conflicts with his teachers. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. The following year Dali held his first one-man show in Paris and he joined the Paris Surrealist Group, led by former Dadaist, Andre Breton, after passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting.
In the same year, Gala went into his life when visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. Dali soon became a leader of the Surrealist Movement as he took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method, which he named `critical paranoia'. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax The Persistence of Memory, 1931. In 1937, Dali visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style. This together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) has led him into a clash with the Surrealists and he expelled from the Surrealist movement.
In 1940, Dali and Gala moved to the USA, and since that time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity. The museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed in 1942 by the publication of Dali's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. In 1974 Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in Figueres, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dali's health began to fail, and he spent the rest his life in seclusion until he died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres. Click here to see a collection of most famous paintings of Salvador Dai.
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by Khalid Al Tahmazi
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