Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989) was a Spanish painter and one of the most prominent figures of Surrealism. [1] He is best known for The Persistence of Memory (1931), whose soft, melting watches became an emblem of the movement. [2] Working in a precise, hallucinatory style he termed the "paranoiac-critical method," Dalí also produced sculpture, film, and writing over a career of more than five decades. [1]
Early life and education
Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres, a town in the Catalonia region of northeastern Spain. [1] He showed an early aptitude for drawing and painting, and in the early 1920s enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. [1] There he absorbed a range of styles, from academic realism to Cubism and Futurism, while forming friendships with figures such as the poet Federico García Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. [2] His time at the academy ended in expulsion before he could complete his studies. [1]
Surrealism and major work
In the late 1920s Dalí moved toward Surrealism, joining the Paris-based group led by André Breton. [2] He collaborated with Buñuel on the films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930), whose startling imagery drew wide attention. [1] In 1931 he painted The Persistence of Memory, in which limp watches drape over a barren landscape; the work became one of the most recognizable images of twentieth-century art. [2] Dalí described his approach as the "paranoiac-critical method," a technique for coaxing irrational, dreamlike associations onto the canvas with meticulous, almost photographic detail. [1]
Later career
Dalí's relationship with the Surrealist group grew strained, and by the late 1930s he had broken with Breton. [1] He and his wife and muse, Gala, spent much of the 1940s in the United States, where he broadened his output to include book illustration, jewelry, advertising, and set design, and contributed a celebrated dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound (1945). [1] After the Second World War he returned to Spain and entered a phase he called "nuclear mysticism," combining religious themes with an interest in science and mathematics. [2]
Legacy
Dalí remained a prolific and flamboyant public figure until his final years, cultivating an eccentric persona as carefully as his paintings. [2] In 1974 he opened the Dalí Theatre-Museum in his native Figueres, built on the ruins of the town's old theatre and now housing a large collection of his work. [3] He died in Figueres on 23 January 1989 and is buried within the museum. [1] He is remembered as one of the defining artists of Surrealism, whose technical skill and inventive imagery continue to draw large audiences to institutions dedicated to his work. [3]
