Dalí, Salvador Felippe Jacinto (1904–1989)

Spanish painter, designer, and writer. Originally drawn to many modern movements, in 1929 he joined the surrealists and became one of their most notorious members, renowned for his flamboyant eccentricity. Influenced by the psychoanalytic theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud, he developed a repertoire of striking, dreamlike, hallucinatory images – distorted human figures, limp pocket watches, and burning giraffes – in superbly executed works, which he termed ‘hand-painted dream photographs’. The Persistence of Memory (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York) is typical. By the late 1930s he had developed a more conventional style – this, and his apparent fascist sympathies, led to his expulsion from the surrealist movement in 1938. It was in this more traditional though still highly inventive and idiosyncratic style that he painted such celebrated religious works as The Crucifixion (1951; Glasgow Art School). He also painted portraits of his wife Gala.

Dalí was born in Figueras, Cataluña, and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. Prior to reading the works of Freud, and subsequently joining the surrealists, Dalí was influenced by Futurism, Impressionism, and cubism. Before attempting to paint dream and nonconscious experience, he studied 17th-century realism. A true surrealist, Dalí used images with multiple symbolic meaning. He placed unrelated objects in unusual spaces within a composition, and painted them so realistically that he made the space believable. After leaving the surrealists and living in the USA for eight years, Dalí returned to Spain where he painted landscapes and religious subjects in a more traditional, yet still individual style.

He is credited as co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1928), but his role is thought to have been subordinate; he abandoned film-making after collaborating on the script for Buñuel's L'Age d'or/The Golden Age (1930). He also designed, and greatly influenced, ballet costumes and scenery, jewellery, and furniture, particulary in the USA. The books The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) and Diary of a Genius (1966) are autobiographical. Dalí was elected to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1979. He was buried beneath a crystal dome in the Salvador Dalí museum at Figueras; the museum, designed by Dalí himself, had been opened in 1974.