Dalí, Salvador

Dalí, Salvador (1904–1989). Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer, film-maker, and writer, born in Figueras, Catalonia. An elder brother, also called Salvador, had died a few months before Dalí's birth, and in childhood he came to identify morbidly with his namesake and had a constant craving for attention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid, 1921–4 and 1925–6, being suspended for a year for insubordination and eventually expelled for indiscipline. By this time he had already had a successful one-man show in Barcelona (1925), which Picasso had admired (Dalí visited Picasso the following year when he made his first trip to Paris). After working in a variety of styles, influenced by Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting, he had turned to Surrealism by 1929. In that year he had a sell-out exhibition at the Galerie Camille Goemans in Paris; André Breton wrote the catalogue preface, and this marked Dalí's official membership of the Surrealist movement. His talent for self-publicity rapidly made him its most famous representative—its symbol in the mind of the general public. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism, claiming that this was the source of his creative energy (one of his most outrageous stunts was delivering a lecture at the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 dressed in a diving suit; he almost suffocated). He adopted the Surrealist idea of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method that he named ‘critical paranoia'. This involved elaborating on the images of his dreams and fantasies and substituting them for—or merging them with—the world of natural appearances. It resulted particularly in the ambiguous double images that play such a large part in his work, in which a form can be read, for example, as part of a landscape or part of a human body.

During the heyday of Surrealism in the 1930s Dalí produced several of the established ‘icons’ of the movement, using a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal ‘dream’ space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory character of his imagery. He described his pictures as ‘hand-painted dream photographs’ and had certain favourite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made of melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York, 1931). Dalí himself said that the melting watches—one of the most parodied images in 20th-century art—were inspired by eating a ripe camembert cheese, but some commentators have sought deeper meanings, seeing them, for example, as expressing a fear of impotence.

In the late 1930s Dalí made several visits to Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks in 1939 (he had been accused of ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ as early as 1934). He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1948. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity and making money ( Breton coined the anagram ‘Avida Dollars’ for his name). From 1948 he lived mainly at Port Lligat in Spain, but also spent much time in Paris and New York. Among his later paintings the best-known are probably those on religious themes, although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. The religious paintings in particular are sometimes dismissed by critics as kitsch, but they are highly popular with the general public: in a London Sunday Times poll published in 1995, Christ of St John of the Cross (St Mungo Museum, Glasgow, 1951) was voted readers' 8th favourite painting (Monet and Munch were the only other painters active in the 20th century to make it into the top ten).

In old age Dalí became one of the world's most famous recluses, generating rumours and occasional scandals to the end (as for example when there were newspaper stories about the appearance of series of prints signed by him but evidently not made by him). Apart from paintings and prints, his output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films—Un Chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)—and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1944). He wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944), and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography—the first of these, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), was described by George Orwell as ‘a striptease act conducted in pink limelight'. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There is a museum devoted to Dalí in his birthplace, Figueras (the building contains his tomb), and another in St Petersburg, Florida.