Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali, Spanish (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, in Figuera, Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age. Dali’s art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School.

In 1923 Dali’s father bought his son his first printing press. He began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid where he was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.

After his participation at the Royal Academy of Art, he went to Paris and began interacting with artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Miró, which led to Dalí’s first Surrealist phase. He is perhaps best known for his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, showing melting clocks in a landscape setting. The rise of fascist leader Francisco Franco in Spain led to the artist’s expulsion from the Surrealist movement, but that didn’t stop him from painting.

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

On January 23, 1989, in the city of his birth, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. His funeral was held at the Teatro-Museo, where he was buried in a crypt.