Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–1989) remains the most recognizable figure of Surrealism and one of the most technically gifted draftsmen of the twentieth century. Pairing the precision of the Old Masters with images drawn from dreams and the subconscious, he carried the movement's ideas far beyond the gallery walls and into film, fashion, theater and popular culture.
Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Dalí spent his childhood summers painting the coastline around Cadaqués, a landscape that would reappear throughout his career. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid in 1922, where he formed lasting friendships with the poet Federico García Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and held his first solo exhibition at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1925. Expelled from the academy in 1926, he traveled to Paris and met Pablo Picasso. By 1929 he had joined the Surrealist circle in Paris, completed the film Un Chien Andalou with Buñuel, and met Gala, who later became his wife, muse and manager.
Dalí developed what he called the paranoiac-critical method, a way of summoning irrational associations and rendering them with photographic clarity. The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its softened watches draped across a Catalan shoreline, entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1934 and became the defining image of the movement. He was equally prolific as a printmaker and illustrator: his 100 color wood engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy, published by Les Heures Claires in Paris beginning in 1960, translated his watercolors into thousands of hand-carved blocks.
Dalí lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948, a period that included his 1941 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and the dream sequence he designed for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). In 1974 he inaugurated the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, built on the ruins of the municipal theater where he had exhibited as a teenager, and where he is buried today. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate, London; and The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which opened in 1982 around the collection of A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse.
Salvador Dalí achievements included:
- 1964 - Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, Spain
- 1979 - Foreign Associate Member, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris
- 1979 - Retrospective, Centre Pompidou, Paris
- 1980 - Retrospective, Tate Gallery, London
- 1982 - Marquis of Dalí de Púbol, conferred by King Juan Carlos I
GALLERY M represents a select collection of Salvador Dalí's works. Contact us today to verify availability either online or at 1.877.331.8401. 