Salvador Dali: Biography, Paintings, Surrealism, & Facts.
                     SALVADOR DALI | 
BIOGRAPHY, 
PAINTINGS, 
SURREALISM, & 
FACTS
INTRODUCTION
Salvador Dalí is among the most versatile and prolific artists 
of the 20th century and the most famous Surrealist. 
Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the 
course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, 
printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most 
famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Buñuel 
and Alfred Hitchcock
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Accomplishments
Frerueduiand tihaeonry  tuhnderopirnys Dalí's attempts at forging a visual 
language capable of rendering his dreams and 
hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now 
ubiquitous images through which Dalí achieved tremendous 
fame during his lifetime and beyond.
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Accomplishments
Obsessive themes of 
Oebrsoestsiivcei sthmemes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate 
Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of 
the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on 
blatantly autobiographical material and childhood 
memories, Dalí's work is rife with often ready-interpreted 
symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to 
religious symbols.
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Accomplishments
Paranoiac Critical
Dalí subscribed to Surrealist André Breton's theory of 
automatism, but ultimately opted for his own self-created 
system of tapping the unconscious termed "paranoiac 
critical," a state in which one could simulate delusion while 
maintaining one's sanity.
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Childhood
Dalí was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to 
a prosperous middle-class family. The family suffered greatly 
before the artist's birth, because their first son (also named 
Salvador) died quickly.
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Early Life
From a very young age, Dalí found much inspiration in the 
surrounding Catalan environs of his childhood and many of 
its landscapes would become recurring motifs in his later 
key paintings. His lawyer father and his mother greatly 
nurtured his early interest in art.
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Early Training
In 1922 Dalí enrolled at the Special Painting, Sculpture and 
Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid, where he lived 
at the Residencia de Students. Dalí fully came of age there 
and started to confidently inhabit his flamboyant and 
provocative persona. 
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Dalí and Gala in the 
United States
Dalí had a presence in the United States even before his first 
visit to the country. The art dealer Julien Levy organized an 
exhibition of Dalí's work in New York in 1934, that included 
The Persistence of Memory. 
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Return to Port Lligat
After being ousted from the family home in 1929, Dalí 
purchased a small seaside house in the nearby fishing 
village of Port Lligat. Eventually he bought up all of the 
houses around it, transforming his property into a grand 
villa. 
Gala and Dalí moved back to Port Lligat in 1948, making it 
their home base for the next three decades.
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Late Period and Death
The last two decades of Dalí's life would be the most difficult 
and psychologically arduous. In 1968 he bought a castle in 
Pubol for Gala and in 1971 she began staying there for 
weeks at a time, on her own, forbidding Dalí from visiting 
without her permission. 
On January 23, 1989, Dalí died of heart failure while listening 
to his favorite record, Tristan and Isolde. He is buried 
beneath the museum that he built in Figueres. 
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