Salvador Dali Biography An eccentric and masterful Surrealist in painting and in life, Salvador Dali wrote in his diary two years before entering art school in Madrid during the early 1920s: "I'll be a genius... Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius." Throughout his life,Dali cultivated eccentricity and exaggerated a predisposition towards narcissistic exhibitionism, claiming that his creative energies were derived from it. The spectrum of imagery from fantastic to nightmarish visions which Dali produced are the supreme evidence of those idiosyncrasies. Born in Figueras, Spain, Dali first studied at the cole des Beaux Arts in Madrid and was influenced by Metaphysical painters de Chirico and Carra while there. Equally admiring the meticulous realism of the Pre-Raphaelites and French 19th century painters, he began to blend conceptual styles and technique. Beginning in 1927, Dali exhibited in Madrid and Barcelona, earning a reputation for being one of the most promising younger painters. A visit to Paris in 1928 brought him into contact with Picasso and the Surrealists Miro, Masson, Ernst, Tanguy and Andr, Breton; shortly thereafter, his first exhibition brought Dali firmly into the Surrealist movement where he was a leading figure during the next ten years. Dali transformed the definition of Surrealism, which combined pure psychic automatism expressing the unconscious process of thought, dream and associated realities to include what he called "critical paranoia," a theory that embraced delusion while remaining aware that reason has been deliberately suspended. With his realistic detail, Dali's paintings describe a hallucinatory reality which is often contradicted by the vision and hallucinatory character his imagery describes; "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), depicting perfectly detailed clocks melting in a Catalan landscape, conveys that theory. Although a collaborator with Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel, Dali, whose work was identified with Surrealism more than any other artist by the public, was expelled from the movement by Breton in 1937. After visiting Italy the same year, he briefly changed his style of painting to reflect the academic influence of Raphael before returning to a more private mythology. By 1940 he left for 15 years in the United States. With his first retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1941, Dali devoted his energies towards publicity during those years before returning to Spain in 1955. Included in major museums worldwide, Dali's work continues to fascinate, most recently with a major exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994 of the celebrated early Surrealist years. Beginnings As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. In the late 1920s, two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style:      • His discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic           significance of  subconscious imagery; and      • His affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists        and writers who  sought to establish the "greater        reality" of man's subconscious over his reason. Surrealism To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.” Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of these enigmatic images is "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), in which limp, melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, Dalí also made two Surrealistic films:      • Un Chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog); and      • L'Âge d'or (1930; The Golden Age). Both films are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images. Renaissance In the late 1930s, Dalí switched to painting in a more academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and as a consequence he was expelled from the Surrealist movement. Thereafter, he spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry, as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centering on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, these later paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist's earlier works. The most interesting and revealing of Dalí's books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942-44).

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