Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 Salvador Dali was born in May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town
of Figueres, Spain, 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, Salvador 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 Salvador Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in
Madrid. Early recognition of Salvador 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, Dalí 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 Dalí's lover, muse,
business manager, and chief inspiration.
Dalí 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 Dalí
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 style that eventually became known as his
"classic" period, demonstrating a preoccupation with science and
religion.
Dalí 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 religous 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, Dalí 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 Dalí died on January 23,
1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications.
As
an artist, Salvador Dalí 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, jewels and objects of all
descriptions.
Whether working from pure inspiration or on a
commissioned illustration, Dalí's matchless insight and symbolic
complexity are apparent. Above all, Dalí was a superb draftsman.
His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the
art of the twentieth century.
"Every morning when I wake up I
experience an exquisite joy—the joy of being Salvador Dalí—and I ask
myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going
to accomplish today?’" —Salvador Dalí. |
Biography from MB Fine Art, LLC:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born May 11, 1904 in the small Spanish town of Figueras in the province of Catalunya. The name 'Salvador' had been given to an older brother who died in infancy. When Dali was born the name was passed on to him. No one could have known just how revolutionary and important this name would become to the art world. Growing up, Dali was a difficult child and refused to conform to family or community customs. Dali's father, a respected notary, his mother and younger sister all encouraged Dali's early interest in art. In fact, a room in the family home was the young artist's first studio. Early on, Dali's talent was already refined beyond his years, and with each year his talent only grew, as did his interests.
After receiving private art lessons in Figueras for some time, Dali enrolled at the Escuela de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in 1921. There he joined an avant-garde circle of students that included film-maker Luis Bunuel and poet-dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca. Although Dali excelled in his academic pursuits, he never took final examinations, deeming that he had no need for the type of education offered by formal schooling. He was expelled and reinstated, yet it mattered little to him. Salvador Dali's passion for the arts and his need to experience life on his own terms could not be met within the confines of school. He left. This did not sit well with Dali's father however, and Salvador was subsequently disowned. With no true home left to him, Dali moved into a fisherman's shack in the small village of Port Lligat, two miles from Cadaques and not far from the French border. Port Lligat would become the site of Dali's future mansion home where he would spend many years of his life.
It was at this time that Dali came under the influence of two forces that shaped his philosophy and his art. The first was Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, introduced to Dali in Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams. The second was his association with the French surrealists, a group of artists and writers led by the French poet Andre Breton. When Dali visited Paris for the first time, he was introduced to the leading surrealists in the movement, but because of his lack of interest in politics, he was eventually shunned by this group.
It was also around this time that Dali met the woman who was to become one the most important people in his life... his wife and soul mate, Gala. Gala was a Russian girl Dali met following her marriage to the French poet Paul Eluard. She served as a stabilizing force through most of the remainder of Salvador Dali's life. Gala saved him from serious nervous disorientation and took charge of every aspect of his existence: financial, artistic and sexual. With Gala's help, Dali became established as a notable painter in Paris. During the 1930's his paintings were exhibited in surrealist shows in most major European cities and in the United States.
Under the influence of the surrealist movement, Dali's artistic style crystalized into the disturbing blend of precise realism and dreamlike fantasy that became his trademark. His paintings combined meticulous draftsmanship and detail with a unique and stimulating imagination. Dali often described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs,' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax. Dali moved to the U.S. in 1940, where he remained until 1948. His later paintings, often on religious themes, are more classical in style. They include Crucifixion (1954, Metropolitan Museum, New York City) and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Dali truly created a new movement in art, but it was his own unique brand. Along with his other pursuits in the art realm - which included jewelry design, film production and clothing -- it is his paintings and graphic works which remain the pinnacle of his sweeping importance and mystifying genius. To this day, they hang in museums all over the world.
Salvador Dali died January 23, 1989.
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Biography from Acquisitions Of Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Dalí, Salvador (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'.
According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).
In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centering on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.
Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.
1904: Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí was born on May, 11th in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain.
1917: He started to visit the School of Art. First paintings.
1918: First small exhibition in the Theatre.
1921-25: Went to Academy of Arts in Madrid. Conflicts with his teachers.
1925: First stand-alone exibition of Dalí at the Galery of Dalmau.
1926-28: Early explorations of the Surrealism. Dalí in Cadaqués 1927
1929: Gala went into his life. Joined the group of Surrealists in 1930 Gala 1927, and Dalí 1929
1934-37: Dalí had his paranoid-critic-epoch. Dalí and Gala in 1937
1941-44: "Avida Dollars" in America.
1945-49: Dalí the Classic. Dalí and his Daddy in Cadaqués 1948
1950-65: His mystic period. He wrote several books (The secret life of Salvador Dalí).
1963-78: Dalí the Divine - Dalí and the Science.
1979-83: Theory of Disaster.
1982: Gala died.
1989: Dalí, Jan. 23th, died.
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Biography from Robin Rile Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 In the early 1940s Dalí's artistic style shifted from Surrealism to a more traditional approach based on Classical and Renaissance art. As he famously stated, "to be a Surrealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses." Whereas Dalí's previous works had been based on his interest in dreams and the subconscious, he now began to draw inspiration from historical and religious sources, appropriating traditional motifs and creating a daring and innovative visual vocabulary.
Obsessed with the image of the Venus de Milo, which he had viewed in the Louvre, Dalí reinterpreted the classic image with a familiar passion for visual experiment and in doing so created one of his most famous and recognizable motifs. Dalí has imbued the serene and sensuously feminine Venus with a new sense of character and presence, interrupting the smooth and diaphanous drapery with cube-like drawers set into the shape of her torso. Two versions of this subject were executed in plaster. Dalí intended to include the bronze versions in his important 1964 retrospective in Tokyo at the Seibu Museum, but there was not enough time to cast them and only the plasters were exhibited. It was not until 1981 that the artist again attempted to cast the present work in bronze, but his frail health again delayed the process and they were eventually cast in 1988.
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Biography from Fineartgasm.com:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figuera in Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age. His art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School.
In 1923 his father bought his son his first printing press. Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.
As an artist, Salvador Dalí 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.
Dalí worked in all media, leaving behind oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, jewels and objects of all descriptions.
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