Let my enemies devour each other.
Dali was born 08:45 a.m. May 11, 1904, at number 20 Monturiolin street in the town of Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, the son of comfortable middle-class notary Salvador Dali i Cusi. Dali attended Municipal Drawing School, where he first received formal art training. In 1916 Dali discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaques with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.
The next year Dali's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919. In 1921 his mother died of cancer, and his father married his aunt, which the younger Salvador somewhat resented.
In 1922 Dali moved to Madrid, where he studied at the Academy of Arts (Academia de San Fernando). Dali already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee britches in the fashion style of a century earlier. What got him the most attention from his fellow students were his paintings where he experimented with Cubism (even though in these earliest Cubist works he arguably did not completely understand the movement, for his only information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalogue given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time).
Dali also experimented with Dadaism, which arguably influenced his work throughout his life. He became close friends with poet Federico Garcia Lorca and with Luis Buñuel at this time. Dali was expelled from the Academy in 1926 shortly before his final exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent to examine him.
That same year he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dali revered; the older artist had already heard favorable things about Dali from Joan Miró. Dali did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró for the next few years, as he groped towards developing his own style. Some trends in Dali's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s, however: Dali omnivorously devoured influences of all styles of art he could find and then produced works ranging from the most academic classicism to the most cutting edge avante garde, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much attention and mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.
1929 was an important year for Dali. He collaborated with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou and met his muse and future wife, Gala Eluard, born Helena Deluvina Diakinoff, a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior who was then married to the surrealist poet Paul Eluard. In the same year, Dali had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris (although his work had already been heavily influenced by Surrealism for 2 years).
In 1934 Dali and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in a civil ceremony.
Upon Francisco Franco's coming to power in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Dali came into conflict with his fellow Surrealists over political beliefs. As such Dali was officially expelled from the predominantly Marxist Surrealist group. Dali response to his expulsion was "Surrealism is me." Breton coined the anagram "Avida Dollars," by which he referred to the Dali after the period of his expulsion; the Surrealists henceforth would speak of Dali in the past tense, as if he were dead. The surrealist movement and various members (such as Ted Joans) thereof would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dali until the time of his death and beyond.
As war started in Europe, Dali and Gala moved to the United States in 1940, where they lived for eight years. In 1942 he published his entertaining autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.
He spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and many other artists. Some think that the common dismissal of Dali's later works has more to do with politics than the actual merits of the works themselves.
Late in his career Dali did not confine himself to painting but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes; for example, he made bulletist works and claimed to have been the first to employ holography in an artistic manner.
In 1958, Dali and Gala were re-married in a Roman Catholic ceremony. Gala died on June 10, 1982.
In Dali's later years, young artists like Andy Warhol proclaimed Dali an important influence on pop art.
In 1960 Dali began work on the Teatro-Museo Gala Salvador Dali in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid 1980s.
In 1982 King Juan Carlos created Dali Marques de Pubol.
After Gala's death, Dali lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself--possibly as a suicide attempt, possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation, as he had read that some microscopic animals could do.
He moved from Figueres to the castle in Pubol which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984 a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear circumstances--possibly a suicide attempt by Dali, possibly a murder attempt by a greedy caretaker, possibly simple negligence by his staff-- but in any case Dali was rescued and returned to Figueres where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum for his final years.
Salvador Dali died of heart failure on January 23, 1989 at Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. He is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres.
