The painter, sculptor, writer, actor, artist, film director, screenwriter, and photographer Salvador Dalí (Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech) was born in 1904 in the town of Figueres, Spain, where he also passed away in 1989.
In 1921, he began his studies at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. The steps of his artistic journey included the assimilation of academic traditional styles, an introduction to Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism, a deep and permanent influence from the forms of Tanguy, and the formulation of his own personal idiom. The study of the works of Freud and Nietzsche played a decisive role, while his introduction to the metaphysical paintings of de Chirico in 1924 guided him toward new directions.
In 1927, he connected with Lorca and collaborated with Buñuel, forming a creative circle in Madrid. In 1928, he met Picasso and Breton in Paris, and in 1929, he was accepted into the Surrealist group and met Gala Éluard. He adopted the Surrealist theory of automatism, but modified it into the “paranoiac-critical method”—an automatic method of irrational knowledge based on the critical-interpretative synthesis of delusional phenomena. From his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1929 until 1937, he produced some of his most important and characteristic works. These featured a complex thematic and formal vocabulary with a multitude of occult, symbolic, Freudian, and metaphorical elements, consciously drawing from his subconscious, traumas, and phobias. He established himself as an artist of optical illusion, dreamlike hallucination, and allegorical imagery. In 1937, he visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style. In 1938, he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, and in 1940, he left for America.In 1941, he turned to Classical and Renaissance art. Following the scientific discoveries of the 1950s—including mathematics, physics, and genetics—he connected the breakthroughs of modern science with religion and mysticism. In 1948, he returned to Spain, focusing from then on on religious themes and academic technique, combining Netherlandish realism, the Italian idealism of the Early Renaissance, Mannerism, and the classical masters and their successors. In 1955, he returned to Italy. His sculptures are characterized by structural perfection, featuring themes from mathematics, religion, historical events, nature, mythology, and the culture of his homeland, Catalonia. The artist’s classical influences coexist with themes from the Christian world, capturing his metaphysical and existential anxieties.
Together with Buñuel, he created the first surrealist films, An Andalusian Dog (1929) and The Golden Age (1930), and he also contributed to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound (1945). He wrote the novel Hidden Faces (1944) as well as autobiographies, including The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) and The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (1976).
During the period of 1960–1974, he worked almost exclusively on the creation of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, where the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation was later established in 1984.