20th Century Spanish
This Catalan painter is universally acknowledged as one of the most important exponents of the Surrealist movement. At the age of twelve Dalí enrolled in drawing lessons at the municipal school in his hometown of Figueras and then, five years later, he moved to Madrid and enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. In the Spanish capital he lodged at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he became friends with Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) and Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). His early works wavered between academic tradition and modernism, with occasional touches of and echoes of the of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).

He was expelled from the San Fernando Academy in 1926 after leading a students’ protest. This encouraged him to move to Paris, where he was introduced to Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) by Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (1895-1984). Three years later, together with Luis Buñuel, he filmed Un chien andalou which is widely viewed as the first Surrealist film. Also in that same year of 1929, he was accepted as a member of the Surrealist group. From that moment onwards, he began to develop his own personal vision of Surrealism, grounded in what he termed the “paranoiac-critical” method which he defined as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, a disfigured world, replete with sexual obsessions associated with Sigmund Freud’s theories and peopled by motifs such as soft clocks, pianos, crutches and decomposing organic matter.

In the summer of 1929 Dalí met Gala who at the time was the wife of the poet Paul Éluard. Gala would become his muse and eventually, almost thirty years later, his wife. In the 1920s and 1930s, Dalí and the designer Elsa Schiaparelli revolutionised the fashion world applying their particular interpretation of Surrealism to bold and elegant exclusive designs, like a lobster dress or a shoe-shaped hat. Dalí’s aesthetics also influenced Christian Dior, who, besides designing a dress inspired by one of Dalí’s paintings, often exhibited works by the artist in his art gallery in the 1930s.

In 1934, Dalí was expelled from the Surrealist group under the accusation of failing to defend the political ideals of the movement as established by André Breton. A trial was convened, and Breton and the other members of the group signed the expulsion order, accusing Dalí of promoting counterrevolutionary acts aimed at the glorification of Hitler’s Nazism.

From 1940 to 1948 he lived in the USA, where he gave lectures, designed jewels and collaborated in a number of film projects. In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York held a retrospective of his work. Six years later he returned to Spain and settled in Port Lligat. Once again, he shocked everyone by declaring himself a Catholic and a political conservative.

From that moment onwards, his works began to be further removed from modernism, imbued by an intense religious mysticism and subject matters inspired by the great masters of Europe’s painting tradition such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) or Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675).

Over the following years several major retrospectives of his work were organised all over the world. Before he fell ill, in 1980, he became interested in research into stereoscopic and four-dimensional painting, of which he considered himself to be a pioneer.

Dalí died in Figueras in 1989. His work can be found in many Spanish museums, although the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueras holds the biggest collection of his works.