The word ‘surreal’ has become so popularised in our language that many of us know what we mean when we say it, but struggle to explain what it is, maybe interpreting it as a reality that appears so bizarre, it belongs to another world.
Often referred to as a paranoid genius for his flamboyant personality and eccentricity, coupled with an outstanding artistic ability, Salvador Dalí is the man responsible for bringing surrealism to the masses. The image of the artist with his dark slicked-back hair, mischievous piercing eyes and trademark upturned moustache, is as recognisable as the dreamlike visions he transferred on to canvas making him one of the most successful artists of the 20th century.
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on the11th May 1904 in the town of Figueres in northern Catalunya, Spain. Named after his father and an older brother who died in infancy, nine months prior to the future artist’s birth, the third Salvador Dalí had an unusual start to life. As well as the name, his parents also gave him his brother’s clothes, dressing and treating him as the reincarnation of their first born.
Dalí’s artistic talents emerged at an early age and the town of his birth would later become the place from which he would launch his long and varied career. Encouraged by his parents and a local Impressionist artist, by the age of fourteen Dalí was ready to exhibit his own work publicly at the Figueres theatre.
In 1922, he enrolled at La Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.
Although undeniably a talented artist, Dalí was far from an ideal student. After a one year suspension for disruption, he was later expelled for refusing to take his final exams, citing what he perceived as the incompetence of his tutors.
By this time, Dalí’s work, had already achieved some notable recognition. In 1925, The Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona played host to his first one-man exhibition, attracting interest from both Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Dalí soon took his first trip to Paris, where he met with Picasso and visited the Louvre. His contacts in the world of the arts were increasing rapidly; already having amongst his closest friends, poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and film-maker Luis Buñuel, with whom he would later make two films.
On Dalí’s second visit to Paris a couple of years later, Miró introduced him to the Surrealist group, a Parisian literary and artistic movement founded by poet and critic André Breton in 1924, which grew out of the earlier anti-war and anti-bourgeois Dada movement. The Surrealists sought to break away from the realist styles of the past, by focusing on the thought process and imagery of the unconscious and dreams, drawing on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud.
Impressed by the young artist, Breton sponsored the first solo Parisian exhibition of his work, which received mixed reviews from the public and critics alike. Dalí invited his new colleagues to Cadaqués on the north Catalan coast, the fishing village in which he’d spent his summers as a child. One particular guest caught his eye, a Russian immigrant, Helena Diakonova, otherwise known as Gala, who at that time was married to French poet Paul Éluard. Dalí and Gala fell in love and from then on, she became his muse, model and a constant companion wherever the artist travelled. His father - by then widowed and remarried to his wife’s sister - disapproved of this new romantic relationship and as a result, kicked his son out of the family home.
Dalí’s popularity was growing fast. A second show in the French capital soon followed as well as the first exhibition of his work in New York. He invented a form of self-hypnosis, the ‘paranoiac critical method’, through which he was able to channel unconscious images. This method produced fantastic results, and from the late 1920’s through the 1930’s, he created some of his most memorable Surrealist paintings. These include two self-portraits, The Great Masturbator (1929) in which the artist presents himself with a typically Dalían soft head, is full of classic Freudian sexual references, and The Persistence of Memory (1931) another self-portrait, featuring the famous melting watches.
1934 was a very busy year; not only did he and Gala finally marry in a civil ceremony in Paris, the artist also held six exhibitions world-wide. Dalí loved to break with convention and challenge viewers to look beyond what they would normally expect to see. Many of his works featured his famous ‘double images’, such as Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) in which a lake works as the reflector, creating a double image framed by the rugged rocks of the Cap de Creus, in the background. The recurring images of the Catalan coast, deserted open landscapes, ants, grasshoppers, his crutch and Gala, to name but a few, are all part of a greater whole; the iconography of Dalí.
In 1936, The Spanish Civil War began and Dalí’s now estranged friend Lorca was murdered by Fascists in Granada. Gala and Dalí travelled to Italy, where he studied Raphael and other Renaissance painters. Dalí began to diversify, finding new ways to express himself through jewellery design and the infamous sculpture Mae West Lips Sofa. His new paintings proved that he was highly skilled in whichever style he chose, now also incorporating more realist detail in to his works. Dalí’s change in direction and the power and money his new status had afforded him, seemed at odds with the mainly Marxist ideology of the Surrealist group, and as a result he was ostracised. Breton later nicknamed him ‘Avida Dollars’ an anagram of his name.
Dalí and Gala moved to the United States for the duration of the Second World War. Apart from painting such significant works as The Poetry of America (1943) and Galarina (1944-45) he also wrote The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), a part fact, part fantasy autobiography. America adored Dalí and everyone wanted to work with him. He engaged in many collaborative projects which took him into the theatre, ballet and opera and led him again into the world of films, working with some of the biggest names of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock on the film Spellbound (1945). During Dalí’s ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ phase, inspired by the horrors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he worked with Walt Disney on the animated film Destino (1946), which did not premiere until 2003.
After the war, Dalí and Gala moved back to their home at Port Lligat, just north of Cadaqués. Dalí had always claimed he was apolitical, but his decision to return to Spain under the Franco dictatorship stated otherwise and was met with criticism by many, not least amongst fellow artists and former colleagues. From the late 1940’s onwards, Dalí focused on religious, historical and scientific themes, as demonstrated in the paintings Galatea of the Spheres (1952) and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959).
Although for many years Gala had been the face of Dalí in his paintings, her husband was a showman, who never missed an opportunity to be immortalised by the camera, but also liked to be part of the creative process. A particularly striking project with photographer Philippe Halsman features a group of naked women forming the shape of a skeletal skull.
In 1958 Dalí and Gala were married by the church, after the artist had rediscovered his Catholic faith. Over the years he’d completed numerous commissions and now he produced work for the church. From early experimentation in impressionism, cubism and futurism to making his name in surrealism, in Dalí’s later work he concentrated on a more classical realist style, inspired by the Renaissance. As Michelangelo and Leonardo had done before him, Dalí began working on large scale paintings.
Freud, Lorca, Miró, Picasso, and Dalí’s family were amongst others who influenced his work, but it is perhaps his brother who had the most profound effect. The recurring motif of death in Dalí’s work, in part stems from what he saw as the presence in his life of the brother he would never meet, and in 1963 he painted Portrait of My Dead Brother.
The 1970’s were again times of change. Gala set up permanent residence in Castell Púbol and Dalí remained at Port Lligat. In 1974 the Teatre-Museu Dalí opened in Figueres, a work of art in itself, which Dalí had been creating over a period of thirteen years. When Gala died in 1982, Dalí moved into Púbol, where his wife is buried. He became deeply depressed, living as a virtual recluse and painted his last picture. In 1984 he had to be rescued from a fire at Púbol and later moved into Torre Galatea, next to the Teatre-Museu.
Salvador Dalí died on the 23rd of January, 1989 and is buried in the crypt of the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figueres, the site on which he first exhibited his work, some 71 years before.
This article was first published in The Xpat magazine in September 2005.