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Salvador Dalí

Spanish

1904-1989

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  1. Les Chants de Maldoror by Salvador Dalí, Image 1.

    Salvador Dalí

    Les Chants de Maldoror, 1934

    Etching on paper

    8.5 x 6.5 in (21.59 x 16.51 cm)

  2. The Quest by Salvador Dalí, Image 1.

    Salvador Dalí

    The Quest, 1981

    Etching and aquatint on paper

    15.5 x 17 in (39.37 x 43.18 cm)

  3. El Cid, from Five Spanish Immortals by Salvador Dalí, Image 1.

    Salvador Dalí

    El Cid, from Five Spanish Immortals, 1965

    Etching on paper

    13.675 x 10.25 in (34.73 x 26.04 cm)

Spanish painter. Specialized in surrealism. Art was a part of Dali’s life from a very young age, and his parents encouraged his artistic tendencies by enrolling him in art school in 1916, and only a year later Dali’s father organized Dali’s first art exhibition of charcoal pieces at their family home. He attended Academia de San Fernando in Madrid where he was influenced by Metaphysics, Cubism, and Classical and Baroque painters such as Raphael and Velazquez (dude his signature mustache came from). Dali discovered Surrealism in Paris painting alongside Picasso and meeting the poet Paul Eluard, sculptor Miro, and painter Rene Magritte. Dali surrealistic paintings developed under three themes: sexual symbolism, ideographic imagery, and man’s universe and sensations. By 1929, Dali underwent his first Surrealistic period and utilized Freud's psychoanalytic theories by accessing his subconscious through what he called the “paranoiac-critical method.” He met and later married Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova, who was formerly the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. She was his muse, and counterbalance to his eccentricities. Due to his apolitical stance, Dali was expelled from the Spanish Surrealist movement at the onset of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. He continued to exhibit internationally in London, and, during World War II, in New York at the MoMA. Dali continued to paint 19 large canvases that displayed themes that were scientific, historical or religious in nature during his “Nuclear Mysticism” 15 year period. With the opening of the Teatro-Museo Dali in 1974 began Dali’s slow decline from losing his collection rights, developing motor disorder, and losing his wife in only two years after that led to a quiet death at the age of 84 in his hometown of Figueres of heart failure.