Salvador Dali is a Spanish painter, sculptor, filmmaker, printmaker, and performance artist. He was born May 11, 1904, and died on January 23, 1989. He lived in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
Early Life and Childhood
Dali was born in Figueres, which is a small town near Barcelona in Spain. His family was middle class, and they had suffered a tragedy before Dali’s birth. His older brother had died, and he was often told that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother. He is known to have had random outbursts filled with rage against his family and playmates.
The landscape that surrounded his home became recurring themes in his later paintings. His father was a lawyer, but his parents supported his interest in art. He was given drawing lessons starting at the age of 10, and he went to the Madrid School of Fine Arts in his teens.
He studied Impressionist and Pointillist styles. At the age of 16, he lost his mother to breast cancer, which was difficult for him. At 19, his father hosted an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in the family home.
Early Training
Dali enrolled at the Special Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid in 1922. He lives at the Residencia de Estudiantes. He developed his provocative personality while he was there. He was known for his eccentricity as he kept his hair long and dressed in the style of the 19th-century English aesthetes. He tried out many different styles of painting while he was there. He was expelled in 1926 for insulting one of his professors during his final exam before graduation.
Next, he traveled to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso. He also started studying Freud, metaphysical painters, and surrealists. He started to explore the concept of reinterpreting reality and altering perception. He did his first serious work in the style in 1927, Apparatus and Hand. It contained symbolic imagery and his signature dreamlike landscape.
Later Years
In 1928, Dali worked with Luis Banuel on a film about abject obsessions and irrational imagery. It was a shocking film and it made Dali infamous. In the 1930s, Dali created his own Paranoiac Critical Method, where he believed that an artist could tap into his or her subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced state of paranoia. He used this method throughout his entire life and it is seen in The Persistence of Memory and Premonition of Civil War.