Salvador Dalí

Who was Salvador Dalí?

Salvador Dalí was a Catalan-Spanish painter, filmmaker, writer, sculptor, and designer who became one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century. He is most closely associated with Surrealism, although his career also crossed cinema, fashion, advertising, religious painting, and public performance.

His paintings joined a controlled, almost Old Master-like technique to images drawn from dreams, psychoanalysis, private memory, religion, science, and the coast of Catalonia. Melting watches, deserted landscapes, insects, eggs, crutches, and bodies that change identity became part of his visual language. The Persistence of Memory made that language widely familiar, but it was one work in a career that continually changed its subjects and media.

Paris was essential to that transformation. Dalí first visited in 1926, met Pablo Picasso, and studied the Louvre. By 1929 he had collaborated with Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou, entered the Paris Surrealist circle, opened his first solo exhibition in the city, and begun the partnership with Gala Dalí that shaped the rest of his life and career.

Salvador Dalí, illustrated

Scenes from Dalí's life, drawn for The Paris Atlas. These are illustrations rather than photographs; the documentary images are further down the page and in the gallery.

Figueres, and the first Salvador

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres, in the Empordà plain of Catalonia, on 11 May 1904. His father was the town notary, a position that made the family comfortable and local. Nine months before the birth, his parents had buried their first son, also called Salvador, dead of a stomach infection at twenty-one months.

Dalí grew up carrying the dead child's name and made a great deal of it later. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) he wrote that his parents took him to the grave at five and told him he was his brother's return. That memoir invents where it pleases and cannot establish what anyone said in 1909. What is documented is the brother, the shared name, and that Dalí was still painting the subject in 1963.

The family summered at Cadaqués, on the Costa Brava, where the road ends and the rock of Cap de Creus goes into the sea in shapes that do not look like geology. He painted those rocks for sixty years. The landscape behind the melting watches is not invented. It is the coast a few hours from the house he was born in.

Madrid: the Residencia, and the expulsion

In 1922 he entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and took a room at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the liberal students' hall that housed most of a generation. Two of its residents mattered permanently: Federico García Lorca, already writing the poems that would make him famous, and Luis Buñuel, who had come to study entomology and left wanting to make films.

The friendship with Lorca was the closest of his life and, on Lorca's side, more than a friendship. Dalí spent decades giving different accounts of what had and had not happened between them, and the accounts do not reconcile. Ian Gibson, who wrote the standard biography of each man, treats the evasions as the subject rather than a gap in the record.

The Academy expelled him in 1926. He had refused to sit his final examination on the grounds that nobody on the faculty was competent to examine him. He was twenty-two and had already had a solo show in Barcelona.

Paris, 1929

He had been to Paris once before, in April 1926, and went straight to Pablo Picasso's studio. The visit rested on a reputation he had not yet earned in France. Joan Miró, a Catalan a decade ahead of him and already attached to the Surrealists, had brought his own Paris dealer to Figueres to look at Dalí's work and had spoken about him to Picasso. Dalí arrived in the city already introduced.

That first journey was also an art-historical tour. He studied the Louvre, visited Versailles, and went to Fontainebleau in search of Jean-François Millet's house and studio. The route matters because Dalí did not arrive in Paris only to reject the past. Picasso and the museums offered different models of artistic authority, and he wanted both.

The work that got him in was a film. He and Buñuel wrote Un Chien Andalou in six days at Figueres by trading dreams, on a rule that no image survive if either of them could explain it. It premiered at the Studio des Ursulines on 6 June 1929, and the Surrealists took both authors in almost immediately.

His first Paris solo exhibition opened at Camille Goemans's gallery on 20 November 1929. The group included The Great Masturbator, The Lugubrious Game, Illumined Pleasures, and other paintings in which an exact, academic finish made irrational scenes appear physically present. Film brought him into the group. The Goemans exhibition established the painter Paris would recognize.

Dalí also reported on the city for the Catalan newspaper La Publicitat in seven articles called Documentary—Paris—1929. He named the Louvre and artists, but also the Ritz, Claridge, Carlton, and the bar at La Coupole. The dispatches show that museums, Surrealist debate, luxury hotels, publicity, and fashionable spectacle already belonged to the same Paris in his imagination.

That summer Dalí invited the group to Cadaqués. Paul Éluard came with his wife Gala and their daughter, and René Magritte came with his. Éluard sat for a portrait during the visit. By the end of it Gala had decided to stay with Dalí, and did, for the next fifty-three years. Dalí finished the portrait of her husband after she had gone.

Gala: partner, manager, and model

Calling Gala Dalí his muse describes only what is visible in the paintings. From 1929 she organized schedules, negotiated with dealers and patrons, assessed work, coordinated projects, and managed the practical structure of his career. Dalí supplied the work and the public performance. Gala helped make both sustainable.

Her contribution reached specific productions. She proofread and helped prepare The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí and worked with him on the Dream of Venus pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair. The double signature “Gala Salvador Dalí,” used on paintings including The Sacrament of the Last Supper, acknowledged the partnership without implying that she secretly painted the canvases.

Gala also remained a principal subject. Across portraits, religious works, and mythological scenes she appears as herself, the Virgin, Leda, witness, and organizing presence. Galarina, Leda Atomica, The Madonna of Portlligat, Galatea of the Spheres, and Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) show how her image changed with Dalí's own movement from Surrealism toward classicism and nuclear mysticism.

The paranoiac-critical method

Surrealism's founding method was automatism: write or draw fast enough that the conscious mind cannot intervene. Dalí wanted the opposite discipline. His paranoiac-critical method took the delusional habit of reading one thing as another and used it deliberately, at full technical control, to build images that hold two readings at once. A bay becomes a face. A group of figures becomes a skull. The picture is executed with nineteenth-century patience and describes something that cannot happen.

The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, carried the method to everyone else. It is small: 24.1 by 33 centimetres, about the size of a sheet of paper. The Museum of Modern Art has had it since 1934, given anonymously, and it has been among the museum's most-visited objects for most of the time since.

• 1929: Un Chien Andalou, and a first Paris solo show at the Galerie Goemans.
• 1931: The Persistence of Memory.
• 1936: the diving suit. He lectured at the London International Surrealist Exhibition in a deep-sea diver's helmet, holding two borrowed wolfhounds, and had to be freed with a spanner when he could not breathe. The audience took the distress for part of the act.
• 1936: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, subtitled Premonition of Civil War, finished months before the war began.

The sources of the Dalí image

The coast around Cadaqués, Port Lligat, and Cap de Creus supplied the hard rocks, empty bays, low horizons, and long shadows of the mature paintings. Dalí did not invent a generic dream desert. He repeatedly made a documented Catalan landscape carry events that could not happen within it.

His illusionism came from sustained study of historical painting. Velázquez, Vermeer, Raphael, Leonardo, and Ingres offered control of space, contour, stillness, and modeled form. Giorgio de Chirico's deserted plazas and unrelated objects provided a more recent precedent for making precision itself unsettling.

Jean-François Millet's Angelus became a lifelong obsession. Dalí treated its two praying peasants as a latent drama of desire, aggression, and death, then recast them as shadows, ruins, sculptures, and components of Surrealist objects. The calm nineteenth-century scene became raw material for his own theory of obsessive interpretation.

• Soft watches, bodies, and instruments turn fixed structures into unstable matter.
• Crutches support physical forms and suggest psychological dependence.
• Ants and insects recur around decay, anxiety, and obsessive attention.
• Eggs, drawers, bread, fish, and other familiar objects acquire private and often changing associations.
• Double images make a face become a landscape, a group become a body, or one object become another.
• Gala appears as portrait subject, sacred figure, mythological character, and collaborator named in the signature.

These motifs are guides, not a dictionary. Dalí reused forms in different contexts and often supplied competing explanations. The safest interpretation begins with what a specific work shows, when it was made, and which source actually documents the proposed meaning.

Expelled from the movement he had made famous

André Breton decided who belonged to Surrealism, and the group tried Dalí in 1934. The charges were political: an insufficient hostility to Hitler, and an interest in the imagery of authority that his colleagues could not read as ironic. He survived that hearing.

He did not survive 1939. By then he was designing department-store windows in New York and selling steadily, and Breton expelled him for good, having first rearranged the letters of his name into Avida Dollars. Dalí spent the next forty years as the most famous Surrealist alive and a member of nothing.

Freud, once

Surrealism took its working theory of the unconscious from Sigmund Freud, and Dalí had read The Interpretation of Dreams as a student. He tried for years to meet him, including a wasted trip to Vienna in 1937. The introduction was finally made in London by Stefan Zweig and Edward James, the English poet who was then buying almost everything Dalí produced.

They met on 19 July 1938 at Freud's house in Hampstead. Freud was eighty-two and had a year to live. Dalí brought Metamorphosis of Narcissus to show him, the conversation went badly in a shared bad French, and while James and Freud talked Dalí sat and drew the old man's head, comparing the skull to a snail.

That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.

Eight years in America

Dalí and Gala left Europe in 1940 and spent the war in the United States, much of it in California. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1941, when he was thirty-seven. He published The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí in 1942, designed the dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1945, and began a short film with Walt Disney called Destino that was abandoned in 1946 and finished by the studio in 2003.

These are the years that fixed his reputation. He came out of them internationally famous and commercially busy, and permanently suspect to the people who had made him.

Beyond painting

Dalí treated film, printmaking, fashion, furniture, theater, shop windows, publishing, advertising, jewelry, and performance as connected fields. These projects were not all equal in ambition or quality, but they make a painter-only account of his career incomplete.

Cinema remained important after Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'or. He designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1945 and began Destino with Walt Disney in 1946. Montage, abrupt scale changes, close-ups, and transformations across time also shaped how he conceived painted images.

In Paris he worked with Elsa Schiaparelli on projects including the lobster dress and shoe hat. With Edward James, he moved Surrealist imagery into furniture and working objects, including Lobster Telephone. Patronage and fabrication were part of those objects from the beginning.

His graphic work ranged from 1930 collaborations with Breton, Éluard, and René Char to later illustrated editions of Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the Bible. Printers and publishers helped translate his drawings through etching, lithography, stencil, serigraphy, and photomechanical reproduction.

The mustache, clothes, declarations, pets, publicity events, and television appearances formed another medium. Dalí understood that mass media could distribute an artist's identity as widely as an image. That skill expanded his audience and fed the commercial objections that had already separated him from Breton.

Port Lligat, and the religious paintings

They returned to Spain in 1948 and to the house at Port Lligat, a fisherman's cottage outside Cadaqués they had bought in 1930 and enlarged room by room for the rest of their lives. The work changed. Dalí called the new phase nuclear mysticism and built it out of two things at once: Catholic subject matter and the physics of the atom, which he had been reading about since Hiroshima.

Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) hangs in Glasgow and shows the crucifixion from above, without a nail or a wound in sight. Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sets the body against an unfolded four-dimensional cube. He and Gala, married civilly since 1934, married again in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

Nuclear mysticism was wider than religious painting. Galatea of the Spheres and Galatea in Creation break figures into suspended units. Leda Atomica makes bodily contact disappear, while The Sacrament of the Last Supper organizes the Eucharist through a dodecahedron. In the 1960s and 1970s he extended the same appetite for scientific imagery into stereoscopy, holography, optical illusion, DNA, and the fourth dimension.

The later work also intensified his study of old masters. Velázquez remained a reference from Dalí's school writing through his final decades, while Vermeer ranked even higher in his private hierarchy. Classicism and science were not competing retreats from Surrealism. He treated both as tools for making improbable visions appear authoritative.

Franco

Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces near Granada in August 1936, a month into the civil war, and has no known grave. Dalí returned to Franco's Spain twelve years later and stayed. His public statements about the regime were neither neutral nor few.

In September 1975, when the government executed five militants over international protest, Dalí told the press that the executions were correct and that there should have been more of them. He was seventy-one and Franco had two months to live. The remarks were reported at the time and he did not retract them.

This record keeps the politics next to the work rather than under it. Gibson's biography, the fullest account there is, argues that the politics and the showmanship came from the same source, and a reader can weigh that. What is not in dispute is that the closest friend of his youth was killed by the side he later praised.

The museum, and after

The Teatre-Museu Dalí opened in Figueres in 1974, built inside the shell of the municipal theatre that had burned at the end of the civil war, on the site where he had shown work for the first time at fourteen. He designed the whole of it, geodesic dome included, and it is the largest single object he made.

Paris gave him a different form of monument in December 1979, when the Centre Pompidou opened a retrospective spanning 1920 to 1980. The exhibition occupied the Grande Galerie and Forum and used a Hector Guimard Métro entrance in its staging. Fifty years after the Goemans show, the former Surrealist scandal figure had become the subject of a national museum spectacle.

Gala died in 1982. Dalí moved into the castle at Púbol that he had bought for her, painted very little, and was badly burned in a fire there in 1984. He died in Figueres on 23 January 1989, of heart failure, at eighty-four, and is buried in the crypt under the stage of his museum.

In July 2017 a Spanish court had the body exhumed to settle a paternity claim, which the DNA test then disproved. The embalmer who had prepared him in 1989 was present and reported that the mustache was intact and still set at ten past ten.