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Salvador Dalí

1904 – 1989

Salvador Dalí was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism, one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936, claiming that this was the source of his creative energy.

As an artist, Salvador Dali was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dali worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolours, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, films, photographs, performance pieces, jewels and objects of all descriptions.

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark ‘soft watches’ that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.

His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters 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 from melting wax.

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 (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

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