Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal¨ª i Dom¨¨nech, 1st Marquis of P¨²bol (May
11, 1904 ¨C January 23, 1989), was a Spanish surrealist painter born in
Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
Dal¨ª was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images
in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the
influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of
Memory, was completed in 1931.
Salvador Dal¨ª's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and
photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated
short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003. He also
collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitchcock's film Spellbound.
Dal¨ª insisted on his "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were
descended from the Moors who occupied Southern Spain for nearly 800 years
(711-1492), and attributed to these origins, "my love of everything that is
gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental
clothes."
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dal¨ª had an affinity for doing
unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who
loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner
sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully-
sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his
works by people from all walks of life.
In 1922, Dal¨ª moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence)
in Madrid and there studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine
Arts). A lean 1.72 m tall dandy, Dal¨ª already drew attention as an
eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee
breeches in the fashion style of the English aesthetes of the late 19th
century. But his paintings, where he experimented with Cubism, earned him
the most attention from his fellow students. In these earliest Cubist works,
he probably did not completely understand the movement, since his only
information on Cubist art came from a few magazine articles and a catalog
given to him by Pichot, and there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the
time.
In 1924 the still unknown Salvador Dal¨ª illustrated for the first time a
book. It was the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" (The Witches of Llers)
by his friend and schoolmate, the poet Carles Fages de Climent.
Dal¨ª also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his
life. At the Residencia, he became close friends with, among others, Pep¨ªn
Bello, Luis Bunuel, and the poet Federico Garc¨ªa Lorca. The friendship with
Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dal¨ª fearfully rejected
the erotic advances of the poet.
Dal¨ª was expelled from the Academia in 1926 shortly before his final exams
when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine
him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented by that time in his
flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, which was painted in 1926. That same
year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom
young Dal¨ª revered. Picasso had already heard favorable things about Dal¨ª
from Joan Mir¨®. Dal¨ª did a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and
Mir¨® over the next few years as he developed his own style.
Some trends in Dal¨ª's work that would continue throughout his life were
already evident in the 1920s. Dal¨ª devoured influences from many styles of
art and then produced works ranging from the most academically classic,
evidencing a familiarity with Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran,
Vermeer, and Vel¨¢zquez, to the most cutting-edge avant-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.
Dal¨ª grew a flamboyant moustache, which became iconic of him; it was
influenced by that of seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego
Vel¨¢zquez.
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