Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol, was one of the most technically gifted and provocative painters of the twentieth century. His carefully constructed eccentric persona became inseparable from his art.
Youth
He was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres, in the province of Girona, son of a notary. He spent his summers at Cadaqués, whose rocky landscapes reappear in many of his paintings. In 1922 he entered the San Fernando Academy in Madrid and the Residencia de Estudiantes, where an intense friendship grew with Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel. With Buñuel he made the surrealist short film Un chien andalou in 1929, with its famous eye-slicing scene.
Surrealism and Gala
In 1929 in Paris he joined André Breton's surrealist group and met Gala, wife of the poet Paul Éluard, who became his companion, muse and manager for life; they married in 1934. In 1931 he painted The Persistence of Memory, with melting clocks in a Costa Brava landscape, now at MoMA in New York. He devised the paranoiac-critical method, a way of bringing out double images and delirious associations with an extremely precise painting technique. His ambiguous attitude to fascism led Breton to expel him from the group in 1939.
The United States and the return
During the Second World War he lived in the United States, where he became a celebrity: he worked for Hollywood, with the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, and with Walt Disney, in fashion and advertising. In 1948 he returned to Catalonia, to Portlligat near Cadaqués, where he turned some fishermen's cottages into a labyrinthine house. In later life he turned to religious and scientific themes, as in Christ of Saint John of the Cross. He died in Figueres on 23 January 1989 and is buried in the crypt of his museum.
The Dalí Triangle
Dalí's three places in Catalonia form the so-called Dalí Triangle, run by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation:
- the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, opened in 1974 in the old municipal theatre, with its geodesic dome, eggs on the roof, the Mae West room and hundreds of works: one of Spain's most visited museums;
- the Portlligat House-Museum, where he lived with Gala, overlooking a small bay (visits by booking);
- Púbol Castle, the medieval castle Dalí gave to Gala, where she is buried.
Other works are in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. See also modern art in Spain.