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Salvador dalí biografie – lebenslauf und künstlerischer einfluss des surrealisten.

Salvador Dalí zählt zu den vielseitigsten und produktivsten Künstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts und war der wohl bekannteste Vertreter des Surrealismus. Obwohl Dalí hauptsächlich wegen seiner malerischen Leistungen in Erinnerung geblieben ist, wandte er sich im Laufe seiner langen Karriere erfolgreich der Bildhauerei, der Druckgrafik, der Werbung und dem Filmemachen zu.

Dalí war nicht nur wegen seiner extravaganten Persönlichkeit und seiner Rolle als verschmitzter Provokateur bekannt, sondern auch wegen seiner unbestreitbaren technischen Großartigkeit.

Seine Gemälde zeugen auch von einer Faszination für die Kunst der Klassik und Renaissance, die durch seinen hyperrealistischen Stil und seine religiöse Symbolik seines späteren Werkes deutlich wird.

Salvador Dalí Biografie

Foto: williamnyk / flickr

Salvador Dali wurde am 11. Mai 1904 in Figueres, in der Nähe von Barcelona geboren. Er war der Sohn von Salvador und Felipa Doménech Dalí. Sein Vater war Notar. Gemäß Dalís Autobiografie war seine Kindheit von Wutanfällen gegen seine Eltern und Klassenkameraden geprägt. Als Reaktion darauf wurde er von ihnen häufig ausgegrenzt. Er war ein intelligentes Kind und schuf schon in jungen Jahren fortgeschrittene Zeichnungen.

Dali besuchte das Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas und das Instituto in Figueras, Spanien. 1921 überzeugte er seinen Vater, dass er als Künstler seinen Lebensunterhalt bestreiten konnte, woraufhin er nach Madrid ziehen durfte, um Malerei zu studieren. 

Er wurde stark von den traumhaften Werken des italienischen Malers Giorgio de Chirico beeinflusst. Er experimentierte allerdings auch mit dem verschiedenen Ausprägungen des Kubismus. Er wurde wegen politischer Aktivitäten gegen die Regierung kurzzeitig inhaftiert und 1925 schließlich von der Kunsthochschule verwiesen.

Frühwerk und Verbindung zu den Surrealisten

Dalis eigener Stil entwickelte sich allmählich : Er fing an, die seltsamen Themen seiner Traumwelt auf äußerst präzise Weise nachzubilden. Jedes Objekt, obwohl sorgfältig gemalt, existierte in einem merkwürdigen Kontrast zu anderen Objekten. Sowohl die gemalten Objekte als auch die Perspektiv- und Farbwahl wurden von Dalí angepasst.

Sein persönlicher Stil zeigte eine Reihe von Einflüssen, darunter vor allem seine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Surrealismus . Die Surrealisten glaubten an die künstlerische und politische Freiheit, um die Fantasie zu entfesseln. Dalís erster Kontakt mit der Bewegung erfolgte durch die Besichtigung von Gemälden, bevor er 1928 bei einem Besuch in Paris andere surrealistische Künstler traf.

In den frühen 1930er Jahren begannen sich viele der Surrealisten von der Bewegung zu lösen und hatten das Gefühl, dass vor jeder künstlerischen Revolution eine direkte politische Aktion stattfinden musste. 

Dalí stellte in dieser Zeit seine paranoisch-kritische Methode vor. Er war der Meinung, dass es unnötig sein würde, die Welt tatsächlich zu verändern, wenn er seine eigene Vision dazu nutzen könnte, die Realität nach seinem Geschmack zu gestalten. Die paranoisch-kritische Methode bedeutete, dass Dali sich selbst trainiert hatte, die Kraft zu besitzen, ein Objekt zu betrachten und ein anderes wahrzunehmen.

Ein Schlüsselereignis in Dalis Leben in dieser Zeit war das Treffen mit seiner späteren Frau Gala, die damals mit einem anderen Surrealisten verheiratet war. Sie wurde zu seinem wichtigsten Einfluss, sowohl in seinem persönlichen Leben als auch in vielen seiner Bilder.

Salvador Dalí und seine Frau Gala | Foto: Marc Ben Fatma / Flickr

Gegen Ende der 1930er Jahre begann Dalis überzogenes Selbstbild andere zu verärgern. André Breton sorgte dafür, dass Dali aus den surrealistischen Kreisen verdrängt wurde. 

Nichtsdestotrotz war Dali sowohl in der Malerei als auch in der Schriftstellerei, im Bühnenbild und im Film sehr erfolgreich. Er setzte sich entschieden gegen die abstrakte Kunst ein und begann, katholische Themen in dem gleichen strengen Stil zu malen, mit dem er zuvor seine persönlichen Albträume geschildert hatte.

Das Dalí-Theater-Museum

In den nächsten 15 Jahren malte Dalí eine Serie von 19 großen Leinwänden, die wissenschaftliche, historische oder religiöse Themen enthielten. Er nannte diese Periode häufig " Nuclear Mysticism ".

Während dieser Zeit erhielt sein Kunstwerk eine technische Brillanz, die akribische Details mit fantastischer und grenzenloser Fantasie verbindet. Er bezog optische Illusionen und Geometrie in seine Bilder mit ein. Ein Großteil seiner Arbeit enthielt Bilder, die die göttliche Geometrie, die DNA und religiöse Themen der Keuschheit darstellen.

Von 1960 bis 1974 widmete Dalí einen Großteil seiner Zeit der Entstehung des Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueres in Spanien. Im Gebäude des Museums war früher das Stadttheater von Figueres untergebracht, wo Dalí im Alter von 14 Jahren seine erste öffentliche Ausstellung erlebte.

Gegenüber dem Teatro-Museo Dalí befindet sich die Kirche Sant Pere, in der Dalí getauft wurde und seine Erstkommunion empfing. Nur drei Straßenzüge entfernt befindet sich sein Geburtshaus.

Das Teatro-Museo Dalí wurde 1974 offiziell eröffnet. Das neue Gebäude basiert auf einem von Dalís Entwürfen und gilt als die größte surrealistische Struktur der Welt, die eine Reihe von Räumen enthält, die ein einziges künstlerisches Objekt bilden. Der Ort ist auch dafür bekannt, dass er das umfassendste Spektrum an Kunstwerken von Salvador Dalí beherbergt, von seinen ersten künstlerischen Experimenten bis hin zu Werken, die er in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens geschaffen hat. Mehrere Werke der Dauerausstellung wurden eigens für das Museum geschaffen.

Foto: William Helsen / Flickr

Ebenfalls 1974 löste Dalí seine Geschäftsbeziehung zu Manager Peter Moore auf. Infolgedessen wurden alle Rechte an seiner Sammlung ohne seine Zustimmung von anderen Managern verkauft, und er verlor viel von seinem Vermögen. 

Zwei wohlhabende amerikanische Kunstsammler, A. Reynolds Morse und seine Frau Eleanor, die Dalí seit 1942 kannte, gründeten eine Organisation namens "Friends of Dalí" und eine Stiftung, um die Finanzen des Künstlers zu stärken. Die Organisation errichtete außerdem das Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Spätwerk und Tod

1980 musste Salvador Dalí die Malerei wegen einer motorischen Störung aufgeben, die zu dauerhaftem Zittern und Schwäche in seinen Händen führte. Er konnte keinen Pinsel mehr halten und hatte die Fähigkeit verloren, sich so auszudrücken, wie er es sich vorstellte.

Eine weitere Tragödie ereignete sich 1982 , als Dalís geliebte Frau starb. Die beiden Ereignisse führten ihn in eine tiefe Depression. Er zog nach Pubol, in die Burg Gala-Dalí, die er gekauft und für Gala umgebaut hatte, möglicherweise um sich vor der Öffentlichkeit zu verstecken. 

1984 zog sich Dalí bei einem Brand schwere Verletzungen zu, die ihn in den Folgejahren an einen Rollstuhl banden. Freunde, Gönner und Künstlerkollegen brachten ihn nach Figueres zurück, wo er sich im Teatro-Museo am wohlsten fühlte.

Im November 1988 kam Salvador Dalí mit einem Herzversagen in ein Krankenhaus in Figueres. Nach einer kurzen Genesung kehrte er ins Teatro-Museo zurück. 

Nur wenige Monate darauf verstarb der Künstler am 23. Januar 1989 in seiner Geburtsstadt im Alter von 84 Jahren. Seine Beerdigung fand im Teatro-Museo statt, wo er in einer Krypta begraben wurde.

Foto: Louise Feige / Flickr

Weitere Ressourcen 

Salvador dalí bücher.

• Gilles Néret: Dalí
• Robert Descharnes: Dalí. Das malerische Werk
• ​ Torsten Otte. Salvador Dali. Eine Biographie mit Selbstzeugnissen des Künstlers 
• https://www.daskreativeuniversum.de/surrealismus-kunst-merkmal-kunstler-werke/
• https://www.daskreativeuniversum.de/15-fakten-die-bestandigkeit-der-erinnerung/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkGfWZfRzWM
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycZtblDZgA

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What was Salvador Dalí’s early life like?

Where did salvador dalí get his education, what is salvador dalí best known for.

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Salvador Dalí

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• artnet - Biography of Salvador Dalí
• The Art Story - Biography of Salvador Dali
• Art in Context - Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist
• Academia - Salvador Dali and surrealism
• Guggenheim - Biography of Salvador Dalí
• Official Site of The Dali Museum
• Salvador Dali - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Salvador Dalí - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Salvador Dalí was the son of Salvador Dalí Cusí, a notary, and Felipa Domènech Ferrés. His family lived in Figueras, Catalonia , Spain , but spent summers in the seaside community of Cadaqués, where Dalí drew and painted the coastal landscape and his family. There he also studied painting with Ramón Pichot, a family friend.

Salvador Dalí began his formal education at a public school in Figueras, Catalonia , Spain , but, because of the boy’s daydreaming, his father switched him to a private school where instruction was in French. Later he studied at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid , where he befriended Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel .

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches. Dalí also collaborated with director Luis Buñuel on the Surrealistic films Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog ) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age ).

Salvador Dalí (born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain—died January 23, 1989, Figueras) was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker , influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery.

As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona , Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud ’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “ paranoiac critical.”

Once Dalí hit on that method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings which made him the world’s best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dreamworld in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed , deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion . Dalí portrayed those objects in meticulous , almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of those enigmatic images is The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which limp melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel , Dalí made two Surrealistic films — Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog ) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age )—that are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more-academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael . His ambivalent political views during the rise of fascism alienated his Surrealist colleagues, and he was eventually expelled from the group. Thereafter, he spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States , where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, those later paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist’s earlier works. The most interesting and revealing of Dalí’s books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

Salvador Dalí

Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.

(1904-1989)

Who Was Salvador Dalí?

Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary. Dalí's father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Dalí in his art and early eccentricities.

It has been said that young Dalí was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates. Consequently, Dalí was subjected to furious acts of cruelty by more dominant students or his father. The elder Dalí wouldn't tolerate his son's outbursts or eccentricities and punished him severely. Their relationship deteriorated when Dalí was still young, exacerbated by competition between he and his father for Felipa's affection.

Dalí had an older brother, born nine months before him, also named Salvador, who died of gastroenteritis. Later in his life, Dalí often related the story that when he was 5 years old, his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother's reincarnation. In the metaphysical prose he frequently used, Dalí recalled, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute."

Dalí, along with his younger sister Ana Maria and his parents, often spent time at their summer home in the coastal village of Cadaques. At an early age, Dalí was producing highly sophisticated drawings, and both of his parents strongly supported his artistic talent. It was here that his parents built him an art studio before he entered art school.

Upon recognizing his immense talent, Dalí's parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream in class and stand out as the class eccentric, wearing odd clothing and long hair. After that first year at art school, he discovered modern painting in Cadaques while vacationing with his family. There, he also met Ramon Pichot, a local artist who frequently visited Paris. The following year, his father organized an exhibition of Dalí's charcoal drawings in the family home. By 1919, the young artist had his first public exhibition, at the Municipal Theatre of Figueres.

In 1921, Dalí's mother, Felipa, died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old at the time and was devastated by the loss. His father married his deceased wife's sister, which did not endear the younger Dalí any closer to his father, though he respected his aunt. Father and son would battle over many different issues throughout their lives, until the elder Dalí's death.

Art School and Surrealism

In 1922, Dalí enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He stayed at the school's student residence and soon brought his eccentricity to a new level, growing long hair and sideburns, and dressing in the style of English Aesthetes of the late 19th century. During this time, he was influenced by several different artistic styles, including Metaphysics and Cubism, which earned him attention from his fellow students—though he probably didn't yet understand the Cubist movement entirely.

In 1923, Dalí was suspended from the academy for criticizing his teachers and allegedly starting a riot among students over the academy's choice of a professorship. That same year, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Gerona for allegedly supporting the Separatist movement, though Dalí was actually apolitical at the time (and remained so throughout most of his life). He returned to the academy in 1926, but was permanently expelled shortly before his final exams for declaring that no member of the faculty was competent enough to examine him.

While in school, Dalí began exploring many forms of art including classical painters like Raphael, Bronzino and Diego Velázquez (from whom he adopted his signature curled moustache). He also dabbled in avant-garde art movements such as Dada, a post-World War I anti-establishment movement. While Dalí's apolitical outlook on life prevented him from becoming a strict follower, the Dada philosophy influenced his work throughout his life.

In between 1926 and 1929, Dalí made several trips to Paris, where he met with influential painters and intellectuals such as Picasso, whom he revered. During this time, Dalí painted a number of works that displayed Picasso's influence. He also met Joan Miró, the Spanish painter and sculptor who, along with poet Paul Éluard and painter Magritte, introduced Dalí to Surrealism. By this time, Dalí was working with styles of Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism. Dalí's paintings became associated with three general themes: 1) man's universe and sensations, 2) sexual symbolism and 3) ideographic imagery.

All of this experimentation led to Dalí's first Surrealistic period in 1929. These oil paintings were small collages of his dream images. His work employed a meticulous classical technique, influenced by Renaissance artists, that contradicted the "unreal dream" space that he created with strange hallucinatory characters. Even before this period, Dalí was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Dalí's major contribution to the Surrealist movement was what he called the "paranoiac-critical method," a mental exercise of accessing the subconscious to enhance artistic creativity. Dalí would use the method to create a reality from his dreams and subconscious thoughts, thus mentally changing reality to what he wanted it to be and not necessarily what it was. For Dalí, it became a way of life.

In 1929, Dalí expanded his artistic exploration into the world of film-making when he collaborated with Luis Buñuel on two films, Un Chien andalou ( An Andalusian Dog ) and L'Age d'or ( The Golden Age , 1930), the former of which is known for its opening scene—a simulated slashing of a human eye by a razor. Dalí's art appeared several years later in another film, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Dalí's paintings were used in a dream sequence in the film, and aided the plot by giving clues to solving the secret to character John Ballantine's psychological problems.

In August 1929, Dalí met Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova (sometimes written as Elena Ivanorna Diakonova), a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. At the time, she was the wife of Surrealist writer Paul Éluard. A strong mental and physical attraction developed between Dalí and Diakonova, and she soon left Éluard for her new lover. Also known as "Gala," Diakonova was Dalí's muse and inspiration, and would eventually become his wife. She helped balance—or one might say counterbalance —the creative forces in Dalí's life. With his wild expressions and fantasies, he wasn't capable of dealing with the business side of being an artist. Gala took care of his legal and financial matters, and negotiated contracts with dealers and exhibition promoters. The two were married in a civil ceremony in 1934.

By 1930, Dalí had become a notorious figure of the Surrealist movement. Marie-Laure de Noailles and Viscount and Viscountess Charles were his first patrons. French aristocrats, both husband and wife invested heavily in avant-garde art in the early 20th century. One of Dalí's most famous paintings produced at this time—and perhaps the best-known Surrealist work—was The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting, sometimes called Soft Watches , shows melting pocket watches in a landscape setting. It is said that the painting conveys several ideas within the image, chiefly that time is not rigid and everything is destructible.

By the mid-1930s, Dalí had become as notorious for his colorful personality as his artwork, and, for some art critics, the former was overshadowing the latter. Often sporting an exaggeratedly long mustache, a cape and a walking stick, Dalí's public appearances exhibited some unusual behavior. In 1934, art dealer Julian Levy introduced Dalí to America in a New York exhibition that caused quite a lot of controversy. At a ball held in his honor, Dalí, in characteristic flamboyant style, appeared wearing a glass case across his chest which contained a brassiere.

Expulsion from the Surrealists

As war approached in Europe, specifically in Spain, Dalí clashed with members of the Surrealist movement. In a "trial" held in 1934, he was expelled from the group. He had refused to take a stance against Spanish militant Francisco Franco (while Surrealist artists like Luis Buñuel, Picasso and Miró had), but it's unclear whether this directly led to his expulsion. Officially, Dalí was notified that his expulsion was due to repeated "counter-revolutionary activity involving the celebration of fascism under Adolf Hitler ." It is also likely that members of the movement were aghast at some of Dalí's public antics. However, some art historians believe that his expulsion had been driven more by his feud with Surrealist leader André Breton.

Despite his expulsion from the movement, Dalí continued to participate in several international Surrealist exhibitions into the 1940s. At the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936, he delivered a lecture titled "Fantomes paranoiaques athentiques" ("Authentic paranoid ghosts") while dressed in a wetsuit, carrying a billiard cue and walking a pair of Russian wolfhounds. He later said that his attire was a depiction of "plunging into the depths" of the human mind.

During World War II, Dalí and his wife moved to the United States. They remained there until 1948, when they moved back to his beloved Catalonia. These were important years for Dalí. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his own retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed by the publication of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). Also during this time, Dalí's focus moved away from Surrealism and into his classical period. His feud with members of the Surrealist movement continued, but Dalí seemed undaunted. His ever-expanding mind had ventured into new subjects.

The Dalí Theatre-Museum

Over the next 15 years, Dalí painted a series of 19 large canvases that included scientific, historical or religious themes. He often called this period "Nuclear Mysticism." During this time, his artwork took on a technical brilliance combining meticulous detail with fantastic and limitless imagination. He would incorporate optical illusions, holography and geometry within his paintings. Much of his work contained images depicting divine geometry, the DNA, the Hyper Cube and religious themes of Chastity.

From 1960 to 1974, Dalí dedicated much of his time to creating the Teatro-Museo Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum) in Figueres. The museum's building had formerly housed the Municipal Theatre of Figueres, where Dalí saw his public exhibition at the age of 14 (the original 19th century structure had been destroyed near the end of the Spanish Civil War). Located across the street from the Teatro-Museo Dalí is the Church of Sant Pere, where Dalí was baptized and received his first communion (his funeral would later be held there as well), and just three blocks away is the house where he was born.

The Teatro-Museo Dalí officially opened in 1974. The new building was formed from the ruins of the old and based on one of Dalí's designs, and is billed as the world's largest Surrealist structure, containing a series of spaces that form a single artistic object where each element is an inextricable part of the whole. The site is also known for housing the broadest range of work by the artist, from his earliest artistic experiences to works that he created during the last years of this life. Several works on permanent display were created expressly for the museum.

Also in 1974, Dalí dissolved his business relationship with manager Peter Moore. As a result, all rights to his collection were sold without his permission by other business managers and he lost much of his wealth. Two wealthy American art collectors, A. Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, who had known Dalí since 1942, set up an organization called "Friends of Dalí" and a foundation to help boost the artist's finances. The organization also established the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Final Years

In 1980, Dalí was forced to retire from painting due to a motor disorder that caused permanent trembling and weakness in his hands. No longer able to hold a paint brush, he'd lost the ability to express himself the way he knew best. More tragedy struck in 1982, when Dalí's beloved wife and friend, Gala, died. The two events sent him into a deep depression. He moved to Pubol, in a castle that he had purchased and remodeled for Gala, possibly to hide from the public or, as some speculate, to die. In 1984, Dalí was severely burned in a fire. Due to his injuries, he was confined to wheelchair. Friends, patrons and fellow artists rescued him from the castle and returned him to Figueres, making him comfortable at the Teatro-Museo.

In November 1988, Dalí entered a hospital in Figueres with a failing heart. After a brief convalescence, he returned to the Teatro-Museo. On January 23, 1989, in the city of his birth, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. His funeral was held at the Teatro-Museo, where he was buried in a crypt.

Paternity Case and New Exhibition

On June 26, 2017, a judge in a Madrid court ordered that Dalí’s body be exhumed to settle a paternity case. A 61-year-old Spanish woman named María Pilar Abel Martínez claimed that her mother had an affair with the artist while she was working as a maid for his neighbors in Port Lligat, a town in northeastern Spain.

The judge ordered the artist’s body to be exhumed because of a "lack of other biological or personal remains" to compare to Martinez's DNA. The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, which manages Dalí’s estate, appealed the ruling, but the exhumation went ahead the following month. In September, results from the DNA tests revealed that Dalí was not father.

That October, the artist was back in the news with the announcement of an exhibition at the Dalí museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, to celebrate his friendship and collaboration with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. The two were known for the joint creation of a "lobster dress" worn by American socialite Wallis Simpson, who later married English King Edward VIII .

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Salvador Dalí
• Birth Year: 1904
• Birth date: May 11, 1904
• Birth City: Figueres
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Academia de San Fernando
• Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• The Teatro-Museo Dalí is billed as the world's largest Surrealist structure.
• The Teatro-Museo Dalí is the former site where Dalí had his first public exhibit. The church where he was baptized and later buried is located across the street, and he grew up three blocks away.
• Death Year: 1989
• Death date: January 23, 1989
• Death City: Figueres
• Death Country: Spain

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Salvador Dalí Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/salvador-dali
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 12, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

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Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Filmmaker, Printmaker, and Performance Artist

Summary of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20 th 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. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró . His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work.

Accomplishments

• Freudian theory underpins Dalí's attempts at forging a visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dalí achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.
• Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on blatantly autobiographical material and childhood memories, Dalí's work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.
• Dalí subscribed to Surrealist André Breton's theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for his own self-created system of tapping the unconscious termed "paranoiac critical," a state in which one could simulate delusion while maintaining one's sanity. Paradoxically defined by Dalí himself as a form of "irrational knowledge," this method was applied by his contemporaries, mostly Surrealists, to varied media, ranging from cinema to poetry to fashion.

The Life of Salvador Dalí

The self-assured Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." After, members of the Surrealists would have a tumultuous relationship with him, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him.

Important Art by Salvador Dalí

Un Chien Andalou

By the age of 24 Dalí had acquired an art education, been inspired by Picasso to practice his own interpretation of Cubism, and was beginning to utilize Surrealist concepts in his paintings. 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. For example, in this clip we find a glaring cow's eye in a woman's eye socket soliciting feelings of discomfort. In the scene that follows, a razor blade slashes said eye in extreme close-up. The film turned out to be a sensation and gained Dalí entrance to the most creative group of Parisian artists at the time, The Surrealists. In fact, it's become known as the first Surrealist film yet remains paramount in the canon of experimental film to this day.

35mm Film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Great Masturbator

Central to the piece is a large distorted human face looking down upon a landscape, a familiar rocky shoreline scene reminiscent of Dalí's home in Catalonia. A nude female figure representing Dalí's new-at-the-time muse Gala rises from the head, symbolic of the type of fantasy a man would conjure while engaged in the practice suggested by the title. Her mouth near a male's crotch suggests impending fellatio while he seems to be literally "cut" at the knees from which he bleeds, a sign of a stifled sexuality. Other motifs in the painting include a grasshopper - a consistent beacon for sexual anxiety in Dalí's work, ants - elusion to decay and death, and an egg - representing fertility. The painting may represent Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse and his lifelong phobia of female genitalia right at the cross section of meeting and falling in love with Gala. When he was a young boy, Dalí's father exposed him to a book of explicit photos demonstrating the horrific effects of venereal disease, perpetuating traumatic associations of sex with morbidity and rot in his mind. It is said that Dalí was a virgin when he met Gala and that he later encouraged his wife to have affairs to satisfy her sexual desires. Later in life when his paintings turned to religious and philosophical themes, Dalí would tout chastity as a door to spirituality. This piece has been compared to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights .

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

The Persistence of Memory

This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts the fluidity of time as a series of melting watches, their forms described by Dalí as inspired by a surrealist perception of Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The distinction between hard and soft objects highlights Dalí's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay with which Dalí held unshakable fascination. Because the melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dalí, we might see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'

Dalí often recounted a memory of passing laborious hours at school as a child by focusing on a reproduction of the famous 1859 painting by Jean-François Millet The Angelus . In the classical piece, two farmers are depicted saying a devotional prayer moments after hearing a far-off dinner bell signal the end of their workday. In Dalí's homage, two curvaceous rock figures (another nod to the Catalonian landscape) rise at sunset; the one on the left is a female while the one on the right is male. The woman's form suggests the figure of a praying mantis, a species in which the female cannibalizes the male after copulation. The praying mantis was a predominant theme in Surrealist works signifying the conflicting feelings of attraction and despair within the realm of desire. As The Dalí Museum describes, "In his analysis of the painting's latent meaning, Dalí felt that the female was not only the dominant partner, but also posed a sexual threat to the male..." It can thus be inferred that Dalí saw the The Angelus painting as symbolic of the repression of the male by the female - an overhanging threat to male existence. In a number of works throughout his career, Dalí reused these two forms.

Oil on panel - The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

The Enigma of William Tell

The renowned legend of William Tell is about a man who is forced to put an apple on top of his son's head and to shoot an arrow through it. The story is a modern retelling of the Biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. Dalí takes this age-old tale further yet with a decidedly Freudian bent. Here, the man is holding a baby, and the baby has a lamb chop on its head. In a twist on the theme of paternal assault, the father figure is about to eat the baby, and the birds in the corner await the leftovers. Dalí had a tumultuous relationship with his family, which is hinted at upon canvas in many of his works. This piece is a fine example of how our dreams continually process such persistent dilemmas in our lives through montages of wild symbolism and subconscious representations. Dalí used a few other tools from his symbolic toolkit in this painting. The extended buttock has a sexualized/phallic connotation. The fact that it is held up by a crutch shows the father's weakness and need for assistance. At the time Dalí made this painting he was virtually disowned by his father for his relationship with Gala who is supposedly represented by the tiny nut and baby right next to the father's giant foot, in peril of being stomped out. This artwork also served as a bit of turning point in Dalí's relationship with the Surrealist group. The main Surrealists led by André Breton were leftist supporters of Lenin, while Dalí here gave the evil father figure Lenin's face. The Surrealists were highly upset by such depictions and started proceedings to try to kick Dalí out of their group.

Oil on canvas

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Dalí painted this work just prior to the start of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and said it was evidence of the prophetic power of his subconscious mind. He depicts the anxiety of the time, visually predicting the violence, horror, and doom many Spaniards felt during General Franco's later rule. Two grossly elongated and exaggerated figures struggle, locked in a tensely gruesome fight where neither seems to be the victor. To quote Dalí, the painting shows "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The boiled bean referenced in the title most likely refers to the simple stew that was eaten by the poverty-ridden citizens living through this difficult time in Spain. Dalí's composition manages to express his political outrage. He would later continue to paint about politics and war in a series of works on Hitler and his agreement with Lord Chamberlain of Britain. This image also brings to mind Pablo Picasso's masterwork on a similar topic, Guernica (1937).

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lobster Telephone

Dalí's Lobster Telephone is one of the most famous Surrealist objects ever created. The juxtaposition of two objects that have little to do with each other is a staple of Dada and Surrealist ideas. Here Dalí combines the telephone, an object meant to be held, intimately next to one's ear, with a large sharp-clawed lobster, its genitalia aligned with the mouthpiece. It presents a literal juxtaposition of a freakish underwater creature with a normal machine of daily life in the way of dream pairings, in which we are disconcertedly jarred from our reality and viscerally unnerved by the presence of things that make no sense on a conscious level. Dalí collector Edward James commissioned Lobster Telephone and had four made for his own house. James also commissioned Mae West's Lips sofa from Dalí, which is simply a very large pair of lips that serve as a couch. The sexual connotations of sitting down on a set of beautiful lips are easily conjured.

Steel, plaster, rubber, resin and paper - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

The Mae West Brooch

Dalí's renaissance-man mind was exceptionally creative and prolific and extended into many other fields beyond painting. For example, throughout his career, he designed enough pieces of jewelry to fill a museum. In The Mae West brooch, we find continued Surrealism in the way the teeth are literally pearls, sitting in a slightly plumped leer of a mouth, ever so slightly contorted as to make the viewer uneasy. Most designers in the world of fashion would not get away with such a warped play on perfection. But Dalí claimed that he was inspired by a clichéd phrase: "Poets of the ages, of all lands, write of ruby lips and teeth like pearls," as well as the smile of the brooch's namesake Hollywood star. Interestingly, New York art stars such as Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and countless others would go on to create renditions of famous, voluptuous lips in their own work.

Rubys and Pearls in setting - Dalí Jewels Museum, Figueres, Spain

In Voluptas Mors

At first glance at this photograph, the viewer sees a skull, but deeper observation reveals it is actually composed of seven nude female models. Dalí designed the precise sketch for this work and it took the photographer Philippe Halsman over three hours to realize the image. The photograph's title is loosely translated as "Voluptuous Death". Dalí said, "I value death greatly. After eroticism, it's the subject that interests me the most." The piece is an excellent example of Dalí's many experiments with optical effects and visual perception. Here one can see a skull or the seven nudes, but not both at the same time. The particularities of our individual, visual perception was something Dalí was very interested in because he felt we could find clues about our inner psyches through the different associations artwork evoked. He used these double-image experiments in dozens of works throughout much of his career. Halsman was an established photographer and photojournalist who holds the record for the largest number of Time magazine covers photographed by any one person. After meeting in 1941, Dalí and Halsman worked together for 37 years, until the end of Halsman's life. Their cooperation also produced the famous photograph Dalí Atomicus (1948), and the book Dalí's Mustache (1954), which featured 28 different photographs of the artist's iconic facial hair.

Gelatin silver print

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity

This painting documents Dalí's interest in exaggerating the representation of the female form and his use of abstracted backgrounds. The main force within the painting is clearly its sexual allusion: the rhinoceros horns, commonly used by Dalí, in this case are overtly phallic, both components of the central buttock and disparate images threatening to penetrate it. The painting's title offers a direct clue about the aggressively sexual tone of the work. Art history professor Elliot King was quoted in Dawn Ades' book Dalí as saying, "as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomize the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto) sodomized by her own constitution." The painting therefore reinforces Dalí's conflicting views toward women as mysterious objects of power, seduction, and fear. Dalí's preoccupation with the phallus was a central theme throughout his career, though the degrees to which his works were aggressive or passive differed period to period. This work, not so surprisingly, was owned by Hugh Heffner and hung in the entryway to the Playboy Mansion for a number of years before being sold in 2003.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

Dalí is said to have been a rather poor student in his early years, especially in mathematics. But as the first nuclear warheads exploded in Japan, Dalí became very passionate about atomic theory and related topics. This new interest coincided with a change in his artistic style, leading him back to the realm of classical techniques. The result were paintings that combined his earlier passions for Catholicism and Catalan culture with his new discoveries in math and science - he called this new art theory in his oeuvre "nuclear mysticism." Dalí became especially interested in representing the fourth dimension as can be seen in this work. We see the depiction of the familiar Crucifixion, but instead of painting a regular cross, Dalí uses a mathematical shape called the tesseract (also known as a hupercube). This tesseract is a representation of a four-dimensional cube, in a three-dimensional space, a rather advanced spatial concept. In fact, Dalí worked with Professor Thomas Banchoff of Brown University Mathematics for many years later in his career to solidify his knowledge. Interestingly, Dalí combined his interest in spatial mathematics with a growing personal struggle with religion. In later years, he expressed his feelings about Catholicism in this way: "I believe in God but I have no faith. Mathematics and science have indisputably proved that God must exist, but I don't believe it." With paintings such as Crucifixion , Dalí explores combing these two in one devotional representation. In fact, his painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) similarly deals with divine mathematics and is considered by many to be the greatest religious painting of the 20 th century.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Biography of Salvador Dalí

Dalí was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to a prosperous middle-class family. The family suffered greatly before the artist's birth, because their first son (also named Salvador) died quickly. The young artist was often told that he is the reincarnation of his dead brother - an idea that surely planted various ideas in the impressionable child. His larger-than-life persona blossomed early alongside his interest in art. He is claimed to have manifested random, hysterical, rage-filled outbursts toward his family and playmates.

From a very young age, Dalí found much inspiration in the surrounding Catalan environs of his childhood and many of its landscapes would become recurring motifs in his later key paintings. His lawyer father and his mother greatly nurtured his early interest in art. He had his first drawing lessons at age 10 and in his late teens was enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts, where he experimented with Impressionist and Pointillist styles. When he was a mere 16, Dalí lost his mother to breast cancer, which was according to him, "the greatest blow I had experienced in my life." When he was 19, his father hosted a solo exhibition of the young artist's technically exquisite charcoal drawings in the family home.

Early Training

In 1922 Dalí enrolled at the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Dalí fully came of age there and started to confidently inhabit his flamboyant and provocative persona. His eccentricity was notorious, and originally more renowned than his artwork. He kept his hair long and dressed in the style of English aesthetes from the 19 th century, complete with knee-length britches that earned him the title of a dandy. Artistically, he experimented with many different styles at the time, dabbling in whatever piqued his ravenous curiosity. He fell in with, and became close to, a group of leading artistic personalities that included filmmaker Luis Buñuel and poet Federico García Lorca . The residence itself was very progressive and exposed Dalí to the most important minds of the time such as Le Corbusier, Einstein, Calder and Stravinsky. Ultimately though, Dalí was expelled from the academy in 1926 for insulting one of his professors during his final examination before graduation.

Following his dismissal from school, Dalí went idle for a number of months. He then took a life-changing trip to Paris. He visited Pablo Picasso in his studio and found inspiration in what the Cubists were doing. He became greatly interested in Futurist attempts to recreate motion and show objects from simultaneous, multiple angles. He began studying the psychoanalytic concepts of Freud as well as metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico and Surrealists like Joan Miró , and consequently began using psychoanalytic methods of mining the subconscious to generate imagery. Over the course of the next year, Dalí would explore these concepts while working to consider a means of dramatically reinterpreting reality and altering perception. His first serious work of this style was Apparatus and Hand (1927), which contained the symbolic imagery and dreamlike landscape that would become Dalí's inimitable painting signature.

Mature Period

In 1928, Dalí partnered with the filmmaker Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) , a filmic meditation on abject obsessions and irrational imagery. The film's subject matter was so sexually and politically shocking that Dalí became infamous, causing quite a stir with the Parisian Surrealists. The Surrealists considered recruiting Dalí into their circle and, in 1929, sent Paul Eluard and his wife Gala , along with René Magritte and his wife Georgette, to visit Dalí in Cadaques. This was the first time Dalí and Gala would meet and shortly after the two began having an affair which eventually resulted in her divorce from Eluard. Gala, born in Russia as Elena Dmitrievna Diakona, became Dalí's lifelong, constant, and most important muse, as well as being his future wife, his greatest passion, and his business manager. Soon after this original meeting, Dalí moved to Paris, and was invited by André Breton to join the Surrealists .

Dalí ascribed to Breton's theory of automatism, in which an artist stifles conscious control over the creative process by allowing the unconscious mind and intuition to guide the work. Yet in the early 1930s, Dalí took this concept a step further by creating his own Paranoic Critical Method, in which an artist could tap into their subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state. After emerging from a paranoid state, Dalí would create "hand-painted dream photographs" from what he had witnessed, oftentimes culminating in works of vastly unrelated yet realistically painted objects (which were sometimes intensified by techniques of optical illusion). He believed that viewers would find intuitive connection with his work because the subconscious language was universal, and that, "it speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, feeling of death, physical notion of the enigma of space - these vital constants are universally echoed in every human." He would use this method his entire life, most famously seen in paintings such as The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936).

For the next several years, Dalí's paintings were notably illustrative of his theories about the psychological state of paranoia and its importance as subject matter. He painted bodies, bones, and symbolic objects that reflected sexualized fears of father figures and impotence, as well as symbols that referred to the anxiousness over the passing of time. Many of Dalí's most famous paintings are from this highly creative period.

While his career was on the rise, Dalí's personal life was undergoing change. Although he was both inspired and besotted by Gala, his father was less than enthused at this relationship with a woman ten years his son's senior. His early encouragement for his son's artistic development was waning as Dalí moved more toward the avant-garde . The final straw came when Dalí was quoted by a Barcelona newspaper as saying, "sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." The elder Dalí expelled his son from the family home at the end of 1929.

The politics of war were at the forefront of Surrealist debates and in 1934 Breton removed Dalí from the Surrealist group due to their differing views on communism, fascism, and General Franco. Responding to this expulsion Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." For many years Breton, and some members of the Surrealists, would have a tumultuous relationship with Dalí, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him. And yet other artists connected to Surrealism befriended Dalí and continued to be close with him throughout the years.

In the following years, Dalí travelled widely, and practiced more traditional painting styles that drew on his love of canonized painters like Gustave Courbet and Jan Vermeer , though his emotionally charged themes and subject matter remained as strange as ever. His fame had grown so widely that he was in demand by the rich, well known, and fashionable. In 1938, Coco Chanel invited Dalí to her home, "La Pausa," on the French Riviera where he painted extensively, creating work later exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. But undoubtedly, Dalí's true magic moment came that year when he met his hero, Sigmund Freud. After painting his portrait, Dalí was thrilled to learn that Freud had said, "So far, I was led to consider completely insane the Surrealists, who I think I had been adopted as the patron saint. This young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has made me change my mind."

Around this time Dalí also met a major patron, the wealthy British poet Sir Edward James. James not only purchased Dalí's work, but also supported him financially for two years and collaborated on some of Dalí's most famous pieces including The Lobster Phone (1936) and Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) - both of which decorated James' house in Sussex, England.

Dalí and Gala in the US

Dalí had a presence in the United States even before his first visit to the country. The art dealer Julien Levy organized an exhibition of Dalí's work in New York in 1934, that included The Persistence of Memory . The exhibition was incredibly well-received, turning Dalí into a sensation. He first visited the US in the mid-1930s. And he continued to ruffle the waters wherever he went, oftentimes staging deliberate public appearances and interactions, which were in essence early examples of his love for performance. On one such occasion, he and Gala went to a masquerade ball in New York dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. This caused such a scandal that Dalí actually apologized in the press, an action that prompted contempt from the Surrealists in Paris.

Dalí also participated in other Surrealist events while in New York. He was featured in the first exhibition on Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art . He also made quite a scene at a showing of Joseph Cornell's Surrealist films when he knocked over the projector, famously fuming "my idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it."

After the devastation of the Second World War in Europe, Dalí and Gala returned to the United States in 1940. They would remain for eight years, splitting time between New York and California. During this period, Dalí became highly productive, expanding his practice beyond the visual arts into a wide array of other creative interests. He designed jewelry, clothing, furniture, sets for plays and ballets, and even display windows for retail stores. Dalí's eccentric personality often took center stage in many of these pursuits - for example, while being consigned by the department store Bonwit Teller, Dalí was so angered by changes to his artistic vision that he shoved a bathtub through the window display case.

Dalí (and Gala) wanted to become stars and make a large amount of money so Hollywood was a natural destination for the couple. They did not succeed in their quest for cinematic celebrity, but Dalí was asked by the famous director Alfred Hitchcock to create the dream sequence in his thriller Spellbound (1945). In addition, Walt Disney cooperated with Dalí to create the animated cartoon Destino , but the project was suspended due to financial difficulties following World War II and not actually completed until much later (2003).

Return to Port Lligat

After being ousted from the family home in 1929, Dalí purchased a small seaside house in the nearby fishing village of Port Lligat. Eventually he bought up all of the houses around it, transforming his property into a grand villa. Gala and Dalí moved back to Port Lligat in 1948, making it their home base for the next three decades.

Dalí's art continued to evolve. Besides exploring different artistic mediums, Dalí also started using optical illusions, negative space, visual puns, and trompe l'oeil in his work. Starting in 1948 he would make approximately one monumental painting per year - his "Dalí Masterworks" - that were at least five feet long in one or both directions and creatively occupied Dalí for at least a year. His studio had a special slot built into the floor that would allow the huge canvases to be raised and lowered as he worked on them. He painted at least 18 such works between 1948 and 1970.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí's paintings focused primarily on religious themes reflecting his abiding interest in the supernatural. He famously claimed, "I am a carnivorous fish swimming in two waters, the cold water of art and the hot water of science." He aimed to portray space as a subjective reality, which may be why many of his paintings from this period show objects and figures at extremely foreshortened angles. He continued employing his "paranoiac-critical" method, which entailed working long, arduous hours in the studio and expressing his dreams directly on canvas in manic bouts of energy.

Dalí became quite reclusive while encompassed in his studio making paintings. Yet, he continued to step out to orchestrate stunts, or what he called "manifestations" that were just as outrageous as before. Designed to provoke, these performance-based interactions reminded the public that Dalí's inner imp was alive and well. In one, Dalí sipped from a swan's egg as ants emerged from inside its shell; in another he drove around in a car filled to the roof with cauliflower. When his book, The World of Salvador Dalí , was published in 1962 he signed autographed copies at a bookstore in Manhattan while hooked up to a monitor recording his blood pressure and brain waves. Customers left with a signed copy and a printout of Dalí's vitals. He also made a number of commercials for televisions and other media for companies such as Lanvin Chocolates, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff Airlines - casting his star power far and wide.

In the 1960s when Dalí came to New York City, he always stayed at the St. Regis hotel on 5 th Avenue. He made the hotel bar practically his living room, where parties raged throughout his stay. At the time Dalí had an entourage of strange and charismatic characters with whom he spent his time. Andy Warhol , another eccentric collector of outrageously wacky humans, also spent time with Dalí at the St. Regis. In one legendary story, Warhol brought a silkscreen painting as a gift to Dalí, but the older artist threw it on the ground at the hotel and proceeded to pee on it. Rather than get offended, Warhol supposedly loved the whole episode. The group that Warhol later put together at The Factory was considered a modern evocation of the setting Dalí produced earlier.

Late Period and Death

The last two decades of Dalí's life would be the most difficult and psychologically arduous. In 1968 he bought a castle in Pubol for Gala and in 1971 she began staying there for weeks at a time, on her own, forbidding Dalí from visiting without her permission. Her retreats gave Dalí a fear of abandonment and caused him to spiral into depression. Gala inflicted permanent damage on Dalí after it came to light that, in her senility, she had marred his health by dosing him with non-prescribed medication. The physical damage that Gala wrought on Dalí hindered his art-making capacity until his death. After her death in 1982, Dalí experienced a further bout of depression and is believed to have attempted suicide. He also moved into the castle in Pubol, the site of her death.

One of Dalí's most important achievements during this rough time was the creation of The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. Rather than donating a single work to the city, Dalí said, "Where, if not in my own town, should the most extravagant and solid of my work endure, where if not here? The Municipal Theatre, or what remained of it, struck me as very appropriate." In preparation for the museum's opening in 1974 Dalí worked tirelessly to design the building and put together the permanent collection that would serve as his legacy.

On January 23, 1989, Dalí died of heart failure while listening to his favorite record, Tristan and Isolde . He is buried beneath the museum that he built in Figueres. His final resting place is three blocks away from the house that he was born in and across the street from the Sant Pere church where he was baptized and had his first communion.

The Legacy of Salvador Dalí

Dalí epitomized the idea that life is the greatest form of art and he mined his with such relentless passion, purity of mission and diehard commitment to exploring and honing his various interests and crafts that it is impossible to ignore his groundbreaking impact on the art world.

His desire to continually and unapologetically turn the internal to the outside resulted in a body of work that not only evolved the concepts of Surrealism and psychoanalysis on a worldwide visual platform but also modeled permission for people to embrace their selves in all our human glory, warts and all. By showing us visual representations of his dreams and inner world laid bare, through exquisite draftsmanship and master painting techniques, Dalí opened a realm of possibilities for artists looking to inject the personal, the mysterious and the emotional into their work. In post-war New York, these concepts were incorporated and transformed by Abstract Expressionists who used Surrealist techniques of automatism to express the subconscious through art, only now through gesture and color. Dalí's use of wildly juxtaposing found objects to create sculpture helped shake the medium from its more traditional bones, opening the door for great Assemblage artists such as Joseph Cornell. Today, we can still see Dalí's influence on artists painting in Surrealist styles, others in the contemporary visionary arts spheres and all over the digital art and illustration spectrums.

Dalí's physical character in the world, eccentric and enigmatic, paved the way for artists to think of themselves as brands. He showed that there was no separation between Dalí the man and Dalí the work. His use of avant-garde filmmaking, provocative public performance and random, strategic interaction brought his work alive in ways that differed from the painting - instead of the viewer merely looking at a beautiful work that evoked great imagination, they would be "poked" in real life by a manifestation of Dalí's imagination designed to unsettle and conjure reaction. This could later be seen in artists like Yoko Ono . Andy Warhol would go on to concoct his own persona, environment and entourage in much the same way as would countless other 20 th -century artists. In today's social-media landscape, artists are almost expected to be visibly and socially just as interesting as their art work.

Dalí also spearheaded the idea that art, artist and artistic ability could cross many mediums and become a viable commodity. His exhaustive endeavors into fields ranging from fine art to fashion to jewelry to retail and theater design positioned him as a prolific businessman as well as creator. Unlike mass merchandising, which is often disdained in the art world, Dalí's hand touched such a variety of products and places, that literally anyone in the world could own a piece of him. Today this practice is so common that we find great architects like Frank Gehry designing special rings and necklaces for Tiffany or innovators like John Baldessari lending his images to skateboard decks.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Salvador Dalí

• Defining Modern Art Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Dalí's role in it.
• Dalí window displays at Bonwit Teller Dalí exhibited his works at a famous Manhattan department store
• Dalí and The Surrealists - Master Marketers Top 10 marketing stunts by Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dalí.
• The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí By Meredith Etherington-smith
• The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí Our Pick By Ian Gibson
• Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated life by Gala By the Dalí Foundation Gala
• Salvador Dalí: Master of Modern Art (Masterworks) Our Pick By Dr. Julian Beecroft
• The Dali Legacy: How an Eccentric Genius Changed the Art World and Created a Lasting Legacy Our Pick By Dr. Christopher Heath Brown and Dr. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
• Salvador Dali Our Pick By Meryle Secrest
• Dali & His Doctor: The Surreal Friendship Between Salvador Dali and Dr. Edmund Klein By Paul Chimera
• Salvador Dalí (2 volume, Taschen) Our Pick By Robert Descharnes, Gilles Neret
• Salvador Dalí: 1904-1989 (Basic Art) By Catherine Plant, Gilles Neret
• Salvador Dalí: Catalogue Raisonne of Etching and Mixed Media Prints By Salvador Dalí, Lutz W. Loepsinger and Ralf Michler
• Dalí: The Paintings By Robert Descharnes, Gilles Neret
• Dalí (Basic Art) Our Pick By Gilles Néret
• Salvador Dali : The Impossible Collection By Paul Moorhouse
• Salvador Dali: The Making of an Artist Our Pick By Catherine Grenier
• Dali and Disney: Destino: The Story, Artwork, and Friendship Behind the Legendary Film By David A. Bossert
• Dali - Illustrator Our Pick By Eduard Fornes
• Diary of A Genius
• 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship
• The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
• Collected Writing from Salvador Dalí
• Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida
• Salvador Dalí Museum in Spain Our Pick
• The Salvador Dalí Society
• The Enigma of Desire: Salvador Dalí and the conquest of the irrational Our Pick By Zoltán Kováry / PsyArt / June 29, 2009
• Ambiguous figure treatments in the art of Salvador Dali By Gerald H. Fisher / Perception & Psychophysics / 1967
• Marvels of illusion: illusion and perception in the art of Salvador Dali By Susana Martinez-Conde et al. / Frontiers in Human Neuroscience / September 2015
• The Vernacular as Vanguard Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s Our Pick By Sandra Zalman / Journal of Surrealism and the Americas / 2007
• Object-Oriented Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Poetic Autonomy of Things Our Pick By Roger Rothman / Culture, Theory and Critique / 2016
• The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí By Stanley Meiser / Smithsonian Magazine / April 2005
• Salvador Dalí The Enigma of Faith By Jonathan Evens / Artlyst / April 19, 2020
• Unmasking a Surreal Egotist By Alan Riding / The New York Times / September 28, 2004
• NPR segment on Dalí

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Dali Biography

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Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dali spent his boyhood in Figueres and at 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. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain.

The young Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early recognition of Dali’s talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread (now in the Museum’s collection), 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. He also joined the surrealists, led by former Dadaist Andre Breton. That year, Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. She became Dali’s lover, muse, business manager, and chief inspiration.

Dali soon became a leader of the Surrealist Movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory, with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the Surrealists and was “expelled” from the surrealist group during a “trial” in 1934. He did however, exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade but by 1940, Dali was moving into a new type of painting with a preoccupation with science and religion.

Dali and Gala escaped from Europe during World War II, spending 1940-48 in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. 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.

As Dali moved away from Surrealism and into his classic period, he began his series of 19 large canvases, many concerning scientific, historical or religious themes. Among the best known of these works are The Hallucinogenic Toreador, and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in the museum’s collection, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

In 1974, Dali opened the Teatro Museo 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. It deteriorated further after he was burned in a fire in his home in Pubol in 1984. Two years later, a pace-maker was implanted. Much of this part of his life was spent in seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his apartments at Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo. Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications.

As an artist, Salvador Dali was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dali worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, films, photographs, performance pieces, jewels and objects of all descriptions. As important, he left for posterity the permission to explore all aspects of one’s own life and to give them artistic expression.

Whether working from pure inspiration or on a commissioned illustration, Dali’s matchless insight and symbolic complexity are apparent. Above all, Dali was a superb draftsman. His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the art of the twentieth century.

Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist

Spanish painter Salvador Dalí was renowned for his work within the Surrealism movement. Salvador Dalí’s artistic oeuvre includes painting, cinema, sculpting, photography, and design, which he worked on alongside other artists at times. Dreams, the unconscious, sexuality, spirituality, technology, and his innermost personal connections are all major topics in Salvador Dalí’s paintings. To the dismay of all those who appreciated his artwork and the chagrin of his opponents, his volatile and extravagant public behavior often drew more attention than Salvador Dalí’s artwork.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Childhood
• 1.2 Early Training
• 1.3 Mature Period
• 1.4 Salvador Dalí in the United States
• 1.5 The Spanish Artist Returns to Port Lligat
• 1.6 Later Period and Death
• 2.2 Art Style
• 3 Salvador Dalí’s Artworks
• 4.1 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1993) by Salvador Dalí
• 4.2 Diary Of A Genius (2020) by Salvador Dalí
• 5.1 How Did Salvador Dalí Die?
• 5.2 Is There a Salvador Dalí Self-Portrait?
• 5.3 What Was Salvador Dalí Known For?

The Biography of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí’s aspirations to construct a pictorial lexicon competent at representing his visions and dreams are based on Freudian philosophy. These are among the stunning and now universal artworks that helped him attain immense popularity throughout his career and beyond. The obsessional subjects of erotica, mortality, and deterioration pervade the Spanish painter’s oeuvre, demonstrating his knowledge of and assimilation of psychoanalytic concepts of the period.

Salvador Dalí’s artwork contains a lot of ready-made symbolism, ranging from obsessive and animal themes to theological symbols, and also leans on a lot of autobiographical content and memories of childhood.

To better understand Dalí’s immensely complicated and charismatic artworks, these childhood influences, and to answer questions such as “How did Salvador Dalí die?”, let us take an in-depth dive into this Salvador Dalí biography.

The Spanish painter was born to a well-off family in Figueres, a little village outside of Barcelona. His larger-than-life personality developed amid his enthusiasm for art from a young age. He is known to have had chaotic, frenzied, rage-filled tantrums regarding his family and friends.

He found tremendous influence in his early surroundings in Catalonia, and many of its vistas would become recurrent subjects in his later significant pieces.

His parents nurtured his childhood interest in painting. He started sketching instruction when he was ten years of age and attended the Madrid School of Fine Arts in his mid-adolescence, where he dabbled with Pointillist as well as Impressionist techniques. He lost his mother to cancer when he was only 16 years old, which he describes as “the hardest trauma I had ever suffered in my entire life.”

His father presented a solo exhibit of the adolescent creator’s artistically superb charcoal sketches at the family residence when he was 19 years old.

Early Training

Salvador Dalí enlisted at the San Fernando School in Madrid in 1922. He matured there and grew to comfortably embrace his colorful and controversial image. His eccentricities were well-known and were initially more famous than Salvador Dalí’s paintings. He wore his tresses long and was adorned in the fashion of 19th-century English sophisticates, replete with knee-length britches, garnering him the moniker of a dandy.

He toyed with a number of approaches at the time, pursuing whatever piqued his unquenchable curiosity.

He became acquainted with and grew close to a group of prominent cultural figures that also included Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet, and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel. The residence itself was somewhat advanced, exposing Dal to some of the most influential thinkers of the day, including Einstein, Le Corbusier, Calder, and Stravinsky. However, Dalí was dismissed from the institution in 1926 for disrespecting one of his instructors during his last examination before graduating. Dal was out of school for several months after his expulsion.

He then embarked on a life-altering vacation to Paris. He paid a visit to Picasso’s workshop and drew inspiration from the Cubists’ work. He got fascinated by Futurist efforts to replicate movement and present objects from various viewpoints at the same time.

Dalí started researching Freud’s psychoanalytic principles as well as metaphysical artists and Surrealists, and as a result, he started adopting psychoanalytic ways of exploring the subconscious to develop images.

The Spanish artist would spend the next year delving into these ideas while attempting to devise a method of significantly reevaluating reality and modifying perceptions. Apparatus and Hand (1927), his first significant work in this manner, had the symbolic iconography and surreal environment that would become his distinctive painting hallmark.

Mature Period

He then collaborated with Luis Bunuel on An Andalusian Dog , a cinematographic study on horrific cravings and illogical images, in 1928. The subject matter of the video was so graphically and ideologically offensive that he gained instant notoriety, generating quite a sensation among Parisian Surrealists. The Surrealists pondered bringing the Spanish into their fold and dispatched Paul Eluard and his wife Gala, to see him in Cadaques in 1929. This was the first occasion the artist and Gala met, and soon thereafter, the pair initiated a romance, which led to her separation from Eluard.

Gala was Dalí’s longtime, consistent, and most significant muse, his eventual spouse, and also his deepest interest, and professional manager. He traveled to Paris soon after this first encounter and was encouraged to join the Surrealism movement by André Breton. Dalí subscribed to Breton’s automatism thesis , which states that an artist curtails full command over the artistic process by letting the subconsciousness and intuitive voice direct the work.

However, he took this notion a level higher in the early 1930s by developing his own Paranoiac Critical Method, in which an individual may get into their subconscious via systematic illogical reasoning and a self-induced psychotic condition. After waking from a delusional condition, Salvador Dalí would produce “hand-painted fantasy images” of what he had seen, typically resulting in works of wildly unconnected yet accurately painted items that were often heightened by optical illusion methods.

He genuinely believed that audiences would interact with his artwork intuitively because subconscious communication was ubiquitous, and that “it communicates with the lexicon of the great essential constants, associated with sex intuition, the sensation of death, the tangible concept of the oddity of space – these essential components are uniformly reiterated in every human.”

He would utilize this style for the rest of his life, as seen in Salvador Dalí’s paintings such as The Persistence of Memory (1931). Salvador Dalí’s paintings were particularly expressive of his thoughts on the psychological problem of psychosis and its continued importance as a subject matter throughout the next several years.

He depicted corpses, bones, and allegorical items that conveyed sexualized anxieties of male role models and powerlessness, as well as motifs that alluded to worry over the passage of time. Many of Dalí’s most renowned works date from this prolific time.

While Salvador Dalí’s art was flourishing, his personal life was changing. Although he was encouraged and smitten with Gala, his father was less than thrilled with his son’s connection with a lady ten years older than he was. His early backing for his son’s creative growth was eroding as Dalí drifted more toward the avant-garde. The last blow came when the Spanish painter was reported in a Barcelona tabloid as stating, “Sometimes I spat for pleasure on my family’s photo.” Towards the close of 1929, the elder banished his child from the house.

The ethics of war were at the center of Surrealist disputes, and in 1934 Breton excused Dalí from the Surrealist group due to their contrary viewpoints on communists and fascists. In response to his expulsion, Dalí notoriously responded, “I am Surrealism.” For many years, Breton and several Surrealists had a difficult relationship with the Spanish artist, at times respecting him and at others distancing themselves from him.

Other Surrealist artists embraced him and remained close to him all through the years. In the years afterward, Salvador Dalí has traveled extensively and mastered more classical painting approaches inspired by canonized artists such as Jan Vermeer and Gustave Courbet, while his emotionally loaded subjects and subject matter have remained as unusual as ever.

His great reputation had spread so far that he was in high demand among the wealthy, well-known, and trendy. But Salvador Dalí’s actual magical moment certainly occurred that year when he met his idol, Sigmund Freud.

He was overjoyed to find, after painting his image, that Sigmund Freud had declared, “So far, I had been led to believe that the Surrealists, whom I had taken as my patron saint, were utterly mad. This young Spanish painter, with his frank, obsessive eyes and clear technical prowess, has persuaded me to reconsider.” He also met an important sponsor at this period, the rich British poet Sir Edward James. James not only bought Salvador Dalí’s art but also financially backed him for a couple of years and cooperated on several of Dalí’s most renowned pieces, such as The Lobster Phone (1936)

Salvador Dalí in the United States

The Spanish painter already had a foothold in the United States before his first visit. In 1934, the art dealer Julien Levy staged a show of Salvador Dalí’s paintings in New York, which featured The Persistence of Memory . Dal became a phenomenon when the exhibit was well-received. He initially visited the United States in the mid-1930s. And he kept ruffling feathers wherever he went, frequently arranging planned public appearances and exchanges that were early instances of his affinity for performing.

At one of these events, the pair costumed as the Lindbergh baby and his abductor and attended a masquerade event in New York. This produced such a commotion that he apologized in the newspaper, earning him scorn from the Parisian Surrealists.

While in New York, the artist also attended other Surrealist gatherings. He was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural exhibition on Dada, Fantastic Art, and Surrealism.

He also caused quite a stir when he toppled over the projector during a screening of Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist films, famously seething “My film concept is exactly that, and I was planning to pitch it to somebody who would want to have it produced. I never took notes or told anybody about it, but it’s as if he took it.” Dali and his wife returned to America in 1940, following the destruction of the Second World War in Europe. During this time, he became extremely productive, broadening his profession beyond the visual arts to include a wide range of other creative pursuits.

He created jewelry, apparel, furniture, settings for plays and ballets, and even retail shop display windows. The Spanish painter’s quirky nature frequently took the spotlight in many of these endeavors; for example, when being assigned by the department shop Bonwit Teller, the artist was so enraged by alterations to his design that he slammed a bathtub through the front display case. They wanted to be famous and make a lot of money, so Hollywood was a logical choice for the pair.

They were not successful in their pursuit for movie stardom, but he was asked to create the design for the dream sequence in the film, “Spellbound” (1945), by Alfred Hitchcock. Furthermore, Disney collaborated with Dalí to make the cartoon “Destino”, but the production was halted due to financial issues after the war and was not realized until long later.

The Spanish Artist Returns to Port Lligat

The artist then bought a tiny coastal property in the neighboring fishing hamlet of Port Lligat after being evicted from the family home in 1929. He later purchased all of the surrounding properties, developing his land into a large palace. The couple returned to Port Lligat in 1948, making it their permanent residence for the following 30 years. Salvador Dalí’s artwork evolved throughout time. In addition to experimenting with various creative materials, Dal began to use optical illusions, negative space, graphic puns, and trompe l’oeil in his work.

Beginning in 1948, he would create one huge painting every year – his “masterworks” – that artistically engaged the Spanish artist for at least a year. His workshop included a unique opening in the floor that allowed him to lift and lower the massive canvases while he worked on them. Between 1948 and 1970, he created at least 18 similar pieces. He experimented with photography, as he did with many other artistic endeavors at the period.

Here, he collaborated with Philippe Halsman to make the renowned shot, Dal Atomicus (1948). Salvador Dalí’s paintings throughout the 1940s and 1950s were predominantly religious in nature, reflecting his lifelong fascination with the occult. “I am a predatory fish moving in two waters, the frigid water of art and the boiling water of science,” he famously declared. He intended to depict space as a subjective reality, which may explain why many of his artworks from this period depict objects and individuals at highly foreshortened angles.

He stuck to his “paranoiac-critical” style of spending long, difficult hours in the workshop and articulating his fantasies straight on canvas in frenzied bursts of intensity. The artist became rather solitary while working in his studio on paintings. Nonetheless, he continued to come out to stage stunts, or “manifestations,” that were as absurd as before.

These provocative performance-based exchanges informed the audience that the Spanish painter’s inner rascal was still alive and strong.

He drank from a swan’s egg while ants erupted from its shell in one, and drove about in a car stuffed to the brim with cauliflower in another. In 1962, following the release of his book The World of Salvador Dalí , he autographed personalized copies while linked up to a device that recorded his heart rate and electrical impulses in a Manhattan book shop. Buyers were given a signed hard copy of his book as well as a printout of his vital signs.

Later Period and Death

The latter two decades of the artist’s life would be the most stressful and mentally taxing. He bought a mansion in Pubol for Gala in 1968, and then in 1971, she began traveling there by herself for many days or even several weeks at a stretch, prohibiting him from arriving without her permission. Because he was frightened of being deserted, he grew depressed as a consequence of her absence.

Gala irreversibly injured the Spanish painter after it was found that she had endangered his condition in her mental decline by administering non-prescribed medications.

His physical injuries from Gala hampered his ability to create art till his death. Salvador Dalí suffered from depression again after her death in 1982 and is thought to have attempted suicide. During this difficult period, one of Dalí’s most significant accomplishments was the establishment of The Salvador Dalí Museum in Figueres. Dal said that rather than dedicating a single piece to the city, “Where else but in my own town could the most expensive and substantial of my artwork exist, where else but here?”

The artist worked diligently in the run-up to the museum’s opening in 1974, designing the structure and assembling the collection that would function as his legacy. The Spanish painter died of heart failure on the 23rd of January, 1989. He was laid to rest beneath the museum he founded in Figueres.

Salvador Dalí’s Art Style and Legacy

The Spanish painter exemplified the concept that life is the finest kind of art, and he mined it with such unrelenting passion, purity of goal, and dogged devotion to discovering and polishing his different hobbies and skills that his unprecedented effect on the art world is impossible to deny.

His drive to turn internal to the exterior unabashedly produced a body of work that not only expanded the principles of Surrealism and psychoanalysis on a global visual platform but also demonstrated freedom for people to accept themselves in all our human beauty, with all our imperfections.

He opened up a world of options for artists trying to integrate the personal, enigmatic, and emotive into their works by offering us visual depictions of his visions and the inner world left bare, via fine draftsmanship and masterful painting methods. These ideas were integrated and changed by Abstract Expressionists in postwar New York, who employed Surrealist tactics of automatism to convey the subconscious via art, only now using motion and color.

Dalí’s use of dramatically juxtaposed found elements in sculpture helped loosen the discipline from its more conventional bones, paving the way for renowned Assemblage creators like Joseph Cornell. His impact may still be seen today in artists painting in Surrealist techniques, others in modern visual arts circles, and all throughout the digital arts and animation spectrums.

His unconventional and enigmatic physical presence in the world created the door for artists to conceive of themselves as trademarks. He demonstrated that there was no major distinction between the man and the artist. His utilization of avant-garde movie-making, controversial live performance, and arbitrary, strategic interplay brought his artwork to life in many ways that painting did not: instead of the audience simply looking at a brilliant work that conjured up great curiosity, they would be “jabbed” in real life by an incarnation of the artist’s dreams intended to unnerve and elicit a reaction.

This was later found in artists such as Yoko Ono. Andy Warhol would go on to create his own character, atmosphere, and crew, much like numerous other 20th-century artists. Artists are practically expected to be as visible and socially intriguing as their artistic work in the current media milieu.

Dalí’s also pioneered the notion that art, artists, and creative aptitude might transcend several mediums and become valuable commodities. His extensive ventures into disciplines spanning from fine art to clothing to jewelry to commerce and theatrical design established him as a successful businessman as well as an artist.

Unlike mass commercialization, which is typically derided in the art world, his hand touched so many different objects and locations that anybody around the globe might possess a piece of him. Today, famous architects such as Frank Gehry make unique rings and necklaces for Tiffany, while innovators such as John Baldessari donate his graphics to skateboards. He believed in Surrealist André Breton’s notion of automatism, but finally chose his own self-created technique of reaching the unconscious known as “paranoiac-critical,” a condition in which one might imitate hallucination while remaining sane.

This method, which the artist ironically described as “irrational knowledge,” was taken by his peers, mostly Surrealists, to a range of disciplines ranging from cinema to literature to fashion. Much of Salvador Dalí’s artwork is rooted in the great tradition of art, and the artist has always freely recognized his obligation to painters like Johannes Vermeer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Diego Velazquez.

His method is classic. His surface style is reminiscent of van Eyck’s Flemish paintings and the works of the Dutch minor painters of the 17th century. He has created a still life in the style of his renowned compatriot, Zurbaran. His drawings frequently have Renaissance characteristics. His surreal compositions have been compared to those of Hieronymus Bosch , and he has incorporated mythical and religious subjects that are centuries old.

“Hidden shapes” appear frequently throughout painting history. There is no doubt that he is one of the most well-known and well-liked painters of the 20th century; nonetheless, there is a lot of controversy around him and his work.

Many detractors of the artist argue that after his brief period as a surrealist, he made very little, if any, works that contributed to the art world and to his overall career. Many, on the other hand, like and respect his works and aspirations. In fact, more than one museum, such as the Salvador Dalí Museum dedicated to the artist has opened, displaying many of the works that he gave to the art world throughout his lifetime.

Despite engaging in a meaningful engagement with the history of international art throughout his life – ranging from Renaissance artists such as da Vinci to Cubist Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst – Dalí’s dreams remained bravely in this region. Much that appears essential to us today may lose its relevance in the future when Salvador Dalí’s paintings are placed in appropriate context alongside the work of artists from all times.

He will always be remembered as one of the few 20th century artists who mix deep regard for the past with very current sensibilities. People will always be drawn to his work because of his incredibly personal and constantly unexpected imagination, which is the source of his brilliance.

Salvador Dalí’s Artworks

Although paintings were the bulk of Salvador Dali’s artwork, he also made sculptures, jewelry designs, illustrations for numerous publications and book series, and a sequence of pieces for several theaters and performances that were presented in theaters.

His life and work had a significant impact on contemporary art , other artists within the Surrealism movement, and modern artists.

• Great Masturbator (1929)
• The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• The Enigma of William Tell (1933)
• Lobster Telephone (1936)
• Crucifixion (1954)

Recommended Reading

What did you think of our Salvador Dalí Biography? There is so much to cover, maybe we missed something. Luckily there are in-depth books available that will help you understand Salvador Dalí’s paintings and life even better. Here is a list of books all related to Salvador Dalí’s art and lifetime.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1993) by Salvador Dalí

He was one of the most vibrant and divisive individuals in 20th-century art. He was a Surrealist trailblazer who was both lauded and loathed for the subconscious images he transmitted into his canvases, which he referred to as “hand-painted dreamed images.” This initial autobiography, which spans his 20s and 30s, is as surprising and enigmatic as his work. It is lavishly adorned with more than 80 images of the artist and his creations, as well as hundreds of his works. Here are interesting glimpses of the talented, ambitious, and ruthlessly self-promoter artist who constructed theater sets, store interiors, and jewelry as easily as he created surrealistic paintings .

• Must-read for anyone interested in 20th century art and its artists
• Superbly illustrated with over 80 photographs of Dalí and his works
• Includes scores of Dalí drawings and sketches

Diary Of A Genius (2020) by Salvador Dalí

This book is considered a foundational text of Surrealism, showing the most amazing and personal machinations of his mind, the unconventional polymath prodigy who has become the true personification of the 20th century’s most highly subversive, frightening, and powerful art movement . This is the mind that can imagine and produce scenes of tranquil Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmare scenes of soft watches, flaming giraffes, and fly-covered corpses the next. This book is required reading for anybody interested in 20th-century art and one of its most brilliant and captivating individuals.

• Includes a brilliant and revelatory essay on Salvador Dalí
• Illustrated throughout with over 60 works by the artist
• One of the seminal texts of Surrealism

Salvador Dalí made his debut in the art world in 1929 and remained in the public light until his passing almost 60 years later. His most significant conceptual addition to Surrealism was his early 1930s formulation of a process to organize confusion and thus promote a thorough undermining of reality. The approach described a purposefully bewildered state of mind that allowed a person to link seemingly unconnected events, opening up new pathways of thinking and production. A few well-known Salvador Dalí quotes include: “Don’t bother trying to be contemporary. Regrettably, it is the one thing that you cannot escape no matter what”, and “I adore educated foes as much as I despise ignorant ones who promote me.”

Frequently Asked Questions

How did salvador dalí die.

He died from a heart attack. He was busy listening to Tristan and Isolde , his most favored record, when he passed. He passed on the 23rd of January in 1989.

Is There a Salvador Dalí Self-Portrait?

There are in fact several Salvador Dalí self-portraits. He was famed for being arrogant and self-centered, yet this would emerge to be crucial to his success. His self-portraits teach us more about how he saw himself, and he had a complicated relationship with himself. He worked in a lot of different art forms outside surrealism, and as a result, we have been given his picture in a variety of ways, including the cubist item on this page. He also worked in impressionism when he was younger, although certainly not in portraiture.

What Was Salvador Dalí Known For?

Dalí was interested in the art style known as surrealism. This was an art style in which painters created dream-like images and depicted circumstances that would be strange or inconceivable to encounter in everyday life. Salvador Dalí created sculptures, paintings, and films based on his visions. He created melted clocks and floating eyeballs, as well as clouds that resemble facial features and rocks that resemble bodies.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist.” Art in Context. April 6, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/

Meyer, I. (2022, 6 April). Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/

Meyer, Isabella. “Salvador Dalí – The Archetypal Surrealist.” Art in Context , April 6, 2022. https://artincontext.org/salvador-dali/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Salvador Dali | Biography, Facts, Paintings & Art Style

Salvador Dali was a Spanish artist who was a leading figure of the Surrealism art movement and one of the most famous artists of the 20th century . He was also one of the most colorful personalities of the period known for his eccentricities and exhibitionist acts . Dali’s life, starting from his childhood and till his death, is full of interesting incidents. Though he experimented with several art styles, Dali is most renowned as a Surrealist artist who created many of the best known paintings of the movement including The Persistence of Memory, Metamorphosis of Narcissus and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans . Know all about Salvador Dali including his biography, interesting facts about him, his most famous paintings, analysis of his art style and his quotes.

Salvador Dali showed signs of his artistic talent from an early age but at the same time he developed into an eccentric and self-centered individual. He had a close relationship with his mother and her death when he was 16 was a severe blow to him . Dali was formally educated in art at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid . However, he didn’t think much of his teachers and was expelled from the academy before he could graduate. Dali had a long and close relationship with Gala , who was his wife and his most important muse ; as well as his greatest passion and his business manager . Known as much for his genius as for his bizarre behavior and exhibitionist tendencies, Salvador Dali was one of the most colorful personalities of the 20th century. Know more about his family, life, marriage, career and death through his biography.

INTERESTING FACTS

Dali’s life, starting from his childhood and till his death, is full of interesting incidents. In his childhood, he threw a friend from a bridge ; in his youth he was expelled from the San Fernando Academy of Art ; and in his years of fame, his exhibitionist tendencies reached their peak and his love for money made him do odd things. Dali also had an unconventional relationship with his wife Gala during which she had multiple extra-marital affairs with his permission . Here are 10 interesting facts about Salvador Dali, the most renowned Surrealist artist and one of the most interesting figures of the 20th century art world.

FAMOUS PAINTINGS

Surrealis m was an influential 20th century movement, primarily in art and literature. Surrealist artists rejected the rational in art ; and instead aimed to channel the unconscious to unlock the power of imagination . Salvador Dali was the leading artist of the Surrealism movement. He also used extensive symbolism in his work. Recurring images in his paintings include elephants with brittle legs which evoke weightlessness; ants , thought to be his symbol for decay and death; and melting watches , perhaps symbolic of non-linear human perception of time. Dali’s contributions to Surrealism include the paranoiac-critical method . Though he was expelled from the movement due to clashes with its members, Dali became the most influential Surrealist artist ; and perhaps the most renowned twentieth century painter after Pablo Picasso . Here are the 10 most famous paintings of Salvador Dali including The Persistence of Memory, Galatea of the Spheres and The Great Masturbator .

Though he experimented with several art styles, Dali is most renowned as a Surrealist artist who created many of the best known paintings of the movement . A major influence on Dali’s work were the theories of famous Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. His Surrealist paintings were full of imagery that drew from Freudian symbolism, as well as his own subconscious . Among the most important contributions that Dali made to the Surrealism movement was the paranoiac-critical method , in which he attempted to tap into his subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state . Though Dali continued to work late into his career, critics believe that he was past his prime with recurring motifs appearing through his work. Let’s delve deeper into the art of Salvador Dali by studying his art style.

BEST QUOTATIONS

1 “Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.”

2 “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”

3 “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”

4 “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”

5 “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

6 “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

7 “Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”

8 “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

9 “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”

10 “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

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• World Biography

Salvador Dali Biography

Born: May 11, 1904 Barcelona, Spain Died: January 23, 1989 Figueras, Spain Spanish painter and artist

The Spanish painter Salvador Dali was one of the best-known surrealist artists (artists who seek to express the contents of the unconscious mind). Blessed with an enormous talent for drawing, he painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise way.

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, near Barcelona, Spain. He was the son of Salvador and Felipa Dome (Domenech) Dali. His father was a notary (one who witnesses the signing of important documents). According to Dali's autobiography (the story of his own life), his childhood was filled with fits of anger against his parents and classmates and he received cruel treatment from them in response. He was an intelligent child, producing advanced drawings at an early age.

Dali attended the Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueras, Spain. By 1921 he convinced his father that he could make a living as an artist and was allowed to go to Madrid, Spain, to study painting. He was strongly influenced by the dreamlike works of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). He also experimented with cubism (a type of art in which objects are viewed in terms of geometry—the science of points, lines, and surfaces). He was briefly imprisoned for political activities against the government and was finally thrown out of art school in 1925.

Association with surrealist movement

In the early 1930s many of the surrealists began to break away from the movement, feeling that direct political action had to come before any artistic revolutions. Dali put forth his "Paranoic-Critical method" as a way to avoid having to politically conquer the world. He felt that by using his own vision to color reality to his liking it would become unnecessary to actually change the world. The Paranoic-Critical method meant that Dali had trained himself to possess the power to look at one object and "see" another. This did not apply only to painting; it meant that Dali could take a myth that was interpreted a certain way and impose upon it his own personal ideas.

A key event in Dali's life during this time was meeting his wife, Gala, who was at that time married to another surrealist. She became his main influence, both in his personal life and in many of his paintings. Toward the end of the 1930s, Dali's exaggerated view of himself began to annoy others. André Breton (1896–1966), a French poet and critic who was a leading surrealist, angrily expelled Dali from the surrealist movement. Dali continued to be very successful in painting as well as in writing, stage design, and films, but his seriousness as an artist began to be questioned. He took a strong stand against abstract (unrealistic) art and began to paint Catholic subjects in the same tight style that had previously described his personal nightmares.

Later years

In 1974 Dali broke with English business manager Peter Moore and had the rights to his art sold out from under him by other business managers, leaving him with none of the profits. In 1980 a man named A. Reynolds Morse of Cleveland, Ohio, set up an organization called Friends to Save Dali. Dali was said to have been cheated out of much of his wealth, and the goal of the foundation was to put him back on solid financial (relating to money) ground.

In 1983 Dali exhibited many of his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. This show made him hugely famous in Spain and brought him further into favor with the Spanish royal family and major collectors around the world. After 1984 Dali was confined to a wheelchair after suffering injuries in a house fire.

Dali died on January 23, 1989, in Figueras, Spain. He was remembered as the subject of much controversy (dispute), although in his last years, the controversy had more to do with his associates and their dealings than with Dali himself.

For More Information

Carter, David A. Salvador Dali. New York: Chelsea House, 1995.

Dalí, Salvador. Diary of a Genius. New York: Doubleday, 1965.

Dali, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. New York: Dial Press, 1942. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1993.

Descharnes, Robert. The World of Salvador Dali. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Etherington-Smith, Meredith. The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali. New York: Random House, 1992.

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Salvador Dalì

Nov 14, 2014

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Salvador Dalì. Salvador Dalì (1904 - 1989). 1904, Katalonien Kunstschule und moderne Malerei 1919, erste öffentliche Ausstellung 1921, Seine Mutter starb Madrid und Paris, Dandy Gala, Seine Frau und Muse. Streiten mit dem Vater Pariser Surrealisten 1940, bekommt einen Sohn

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Salvador Dalì (1904 - 1989) • 1904, Katalonien • Kunstschule und moderne Malerei • 1919, erste öffentliche Ausstellung • 1921, Seine Mutter starb • Madrid und Paris, Dandy • Gala, Seine Frau und Muse. Streiten mit dem Vater • Pariser Surrealisten • 1940, bekommt einen Sohn • 1949, zurück nach Katalonien • 1989, starb er

Merkmale und Kunst • Maler, Bildhauer, Schriftsteller, Filmemacher und Konstrukteur. Viele Interesse und viele Künstler kennen gelernt • Surrealismus • Themen: Keine Realität, menschliche Psyche, Unbewusstes, Traum, Visionen, Landschaften, Tod und Erotik • Fantasie, extravagant, exzenter, provokativ • Liebe zum Gold und dem Übermäβigen • Leidenschaft für Luxus • Orientalische Elemente • Kubismus, Dadaismus • Einfluss von Mirò, Picasso, Symbolismus, Renaissance

Mädchen am Fenster (1925)

Öl auf Leinwand • Schwester von Dalì am Fenster, Rückenfigur • Spanische Landschaft am Meer • Blau • Aufmerksamkeit auf Landschaft • Realistisch

Die Beständigkeit der Erinnerung (1931)

Öl auf Leinwand • Bekannteste Gemälde • Spanische Landschaft, Traum • Asymmetrisch • Farbenkontrast • Bedeutung: Die weichen Uhren Keine Regeln, Zeit der Erinnerung, schlecht definiert, Ablehnung der Starrheit

Der Traum (1937)

Ähnlich wie “Die Beständigkeit der Erinnerung” • Schlafender Kopf • Vision des Traums, Kopf mit einem dünnen Körper, gestützt von Krücken

Die Metamorphose des Narziss (1936 - 37)

Öl auf Leinwand • ‘Kritisch – paranoid’ Methode • In zwei aufgeteilt, verschiedene Farben und Metamorphose (von links nach rechts) • Inspiration von einer Reise nach Italien • Beziehung zwischen Illusion und Wirklichkeit • Metamporphose: Links Körper von Narziss gigantisch und felsig Rechts Hand (tödliche Bedeutung) • Ameisen und Schakal Zersetzung und Vergänglichkeit der menschlichen Existenz • Kopf von Narziss Ei, Liebe zu sich selbst • Statue des Narziss (Renaissance)

Traum, verursacht durch den Flug einer Biene um einen Granatapfel, eine Sekunde vor dem Aufwachen (1944)

Öl auf Leinwand • Inspiriert durch Bienenstich • Visionen der Schmerzen • Granatapfel, Fisch, zwei Tiger Biene • Gewehr Stich • Erwachen aus ruhigen Träumen • Elefant mit Obelisk, Einfluss von Bernini Unwirklichkeit

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Art & Exhibitions

Dalí’s deep love of european art traditions resurfaces in a major museum show.

"Dalí: Disruption and Devotion" pairs the Surrealist’s work with European masters, from Goya to Velázquez.

Looking at Salvador Dalí’s bizarre, inscrutable canvases, it’s hard to imagine his inspirations as anything earth-bound. Like any self-respecting Surrealist, the artist drew ideas from dreams, translating those visions into strange symbols and motifs. Or maybe he didn’t need the creative prompts at all: “A true artist is not one who is inspired,” he once declared, “but one who inspires others.”

But a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is making the case that Dalí, while mining his dream reality, was also looking to tradition. “ Dalí: Disruption and Devotion ,” the first-ever show of the Spanish painter’s works at the museum, uncovers how the artist subtly and directly engaged with European art and artists including El Greco, Francisco Goya, Orazio Gentileschi, and Albrecht Dürer.

Installation view of “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Nearly 30 Dalí artworks on loan from the Dalí Museum in Florida, plus several others from a private collection, are on view alongside pieces from the MFA Boston’s European holdings. They are variously paired or grouped by theme and subject matter to newly illuminate the work of the celebrated Surrealist.

For instance, Goya’s “Los Caprichos,” his 1799 series of prints detailing the dark side of civilized society, are arrayed with Dalí’s reinterpretations, which put a playful spin on Goya’s subversive etchings. Meanwhile, Dalí’s Sainte Hélène à Port Lligat (1956), in which he depicted his wife Gala as Saint Helena, is matched with El Greco’s Saint Dominic in Prayer (ca. 1605) to highlight their shared meditation on solitude and supplication.

Salvador Dalí, Morphological Echo (1936). Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. © 2024 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The exhibition will also uncover how European art history runs through Dalí’s own works. In Morphological Echo (1936) and Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life-Fast Moving) (1956), viewers might see hints of 17th-century Dutch still lifes filtered through a Dalí-esque lens. The Ecumenical Council (1960), the painter’s towering ode to spirituality, is riven throughout with Renaissance references, notably to Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement in its portrayal of God.

Salvador Dalí, The Ecumenical Council (1960). Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. © 2024 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. Photo: © Doug Sperling and David Deranian, 2021, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Surprisingly, Dalí also painted himself into  Ecumenical Council . In the work’s bottom-left corner, he is depicted by an easel, his brush held aloft, and his gaze fixed on the viewer—a pose recalling Diego Velázquez’s own self-portrait in his celebrated masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), complete with upturned mustache.

Salvador Dalí, Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958). Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dalí famously revered Velázquez. He echoed the Spanish master’s technique and mastery of light in works such as The Image Disappears (1938), and paid homage in Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958). A reproduction of Las Meninas also hung in his studio. Writing in 1976, Dalí mused: “Since Impressionism, the entire history of modern art has revolved around a single goal: reality. And this leads us to ask: what’s new, Velázquez?”

At the MFA Boston, Dalí’s Velázquez Painting is paired with Velázquez’s Infanta Maria Theresa (1653), a late portrait by the 17th-century artist, its colors and brushstrokes still fresh.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Infanta Maria Theresa (1653). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” opens as Surrealism celebrates its centennial this year. Marking the moment are exhibitions from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium’s blockbuster “ Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism ” to spotlights on artists Remedios Varo and Dora Maar , which, like MFA Boston’s Dalí outing, are shedding new light on the movement’s legacy.

“The Surrealist movement, announced by André Breton in 1924, is 100 years old,” said Frederick Ilchman, the museum’s curator of paintings, in a statement. “The MFA’s exhibition, using superb loans from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, offers a timely opportunity to reconsider the most famous Surrealist in terms of the historical artists he deeply admired.”

“ Dalí: Disruption and Devotion ” is on view at MFA Boston, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, Massachusetts, through December 1.

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