Salvador Dali Biography and Works.

A Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist and designer, Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904.

Young Salvador was an intelligent child, who was prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates.

He was a skilled draftsman. Best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealistic work, his painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

Though Dali took over the surrealist theory of automatism, he transformed it into a more positive method, ‘critical paranoia’. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life.

Dali described his pictures as hand-painted dream photographs’. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dali’s expansive artistic repertoire includes sculpture, film and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

In 1937, Dali visited Italy and later moved to the United States in 1940. During this period, he devoted his time largely in self-publicity. One of his most important works is The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross (1951).

He also made the first surrealist films – Un chien andalou and L’Age d’or and also contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).

Dali died on January 23, 1989 of heart failure.

Trivia

Dali’s full name was Salvador Domenec Felip Jacint Dali i Domenech, Marquis de Pubol.

Quote

“Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately, it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”