Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (Figueras, May 11, 1904-Figueras, January 23, 1989) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, engraver, set designer and writer of the 20th century.
Although part of the immense prestige and popularity that he enjoyed already in life was due to his bizarre and staged eccentricities, Salvador Dalí succeeded in breathing new life into European surrealism until he became its best-known representative;
Salvador Dalí was born in the early spring of 1904 into a bourgeois family, the son of a well-thinking notary and a sensitive lady who was fond of birds.
Since the pursuit would be incessant and the goal would never be reached, and since no corner of his biography was expected to find balance and peace, Dalí decided to be excessive in everything, to play numerous characters and to sublimate his anguish into a plurality of humorous and sordid delusions.
His precocity is surprising: at the age of twelve he discovered the style of the French impressionists and became an impressionist;
In 1921 he left his native Catalonia and moved to Madrid, where he entered the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts.
In the troubled and conflictive months of 1923 he suffered an unfortunate setback.
On leaving prison you will receive two joys.
In 1927 Dalí traveled to Paris for the first time, but it was the following year that he settled in the French capital.
The triple accusation that Dalí had to face then was flirting with fascism, displaying a delusional Catholicism and feeling an excessive and irrepressible passion for money.
Salvador Dalí fell in love with Gala in the summer of 1929 and with her he enjoyed the honey of eroticism for the first time.
Finding out about his son's dissolute life through an article by Eugenio d'Ors that appeared in La Gaceta Literaria, Dalí's father broke relations with his offspring;
Before arriving in Paris, the artist had had his first exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona, in 1925, and his work had passed through cubism and realist currents, such as in Muchacha en la ventana (1925) or his first Basket of bread (1926).
This methodology advocates moving away from physical reality in favor of mental reality: thanks to a controlled use of hallucination and dreams (the paranoid or irrational must submit to interpretative or critical lucidity), the objects of everyday life become into icons of human desires and fears.
Probably for Dalí his theories were less relevant than the provocative and ironic tone with which he exposed them.
A magnificent illustration of the method is the painting entitled Slave Market with the Vanishing Bust of Voltaire (1940, Reynolds-Morse Foundation, Cleveland), in which the philosopher's face is made up of two figures that simultaneously form part of the human group. of the second term.
The Endless Enigma (1938, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) or the multiple delirious reinterpretations of Millet's famous Angelus are other excellent examples of this repeated game of significant perversion of the image.
A few years in the group were enough for Dalí to become the great figure of Surrealism and his work achieved considerable international resonance.
In 1938, thanks to the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, he finally met Sigmund Freud, who had been the great inspirer of Surrealist aesthetics, from which Dalí did not feel marginalized despite Breton's bravado;
Once again living in New York in 1939, Dalí accepted a commission to decorate some shop windows.
The development of the Spanish Civil War (whose outbreak he had intuited in Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, later titled Premonition of the Civil War, 1936) and the premonition of the Second World War had made Dalí want to take refuge in a world without conflicts, and sublimated his surrealist experience by taking up Renaissance iconography and taking an interest, above all, in the economic value of his paintings;
Of particular relevance in terms of the evolution of his work is the trip he made to Italy in 1937;
In 1948 he returned to Spain, establishing his residence again in Port Lligat and finding all sorts of facilities in the regime of General Francisco Franco.
During the 1970s, Dalí, who had declared that painting was "a photograph made by hand", was the endorser of the international hyper-realist style which, coming out of his palette, was no less disturbing than his lengthy earlier inquiry into the limitless and equivocal dream universe.
In his will, the controversial artist bequeathed a large part of his assets to the Spanish State, thus provoking new and bitter controversies even after his death (which occurred in 1989, after a long agony).
His long existence, stubbornly dedicated to torturing matter and canvases with the most perverse fruits of his fertile imagination, remained equally faithful to a dazzling landscape from his childhood: Port Lligat, a bay embraced by rocks where the spirit rests, now to rise towards the most sublime mysteries, pray to be corrupted like still waters.