Part 2 of Dalí
20th Century European Art
20th Century Overview
this floor
lifts

European Art before the First World War Salvador Dalí

To get a larger version of a picture, click on the thumbnail version.
Most pictures are between 50k and 150k bytes.

 Salvador Dalí
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí

born: Figueras, Spain; 2 May 1904
died: Barcelona, Spain; 23 January 1989

Salvador Dalí was the second son of Salvador Dalí y Cusi, a notary, and Felipa Domènech. Their first son died of spinal meningitis age, 7, three years before Dalí was born. In 1908, Ana María, Dalí’s sister, was born. Dalí was spoiled as a child; his only restriction was he could only eat at meals. Some suspect that his fascination with food throughout his life and its visual representation in his art came from this regimen. Dalí's artistic talent was evident from an early age and encouraged by his father.

1910s

When Dalí was ten, in 1914, he began his education at a private school run by the Catholic Church. He was not an attentive student. However, he did like his art classes.

Spain remained neutral throughout the First World. Since Dalí was in school in Spain the whole time, the war barely affected him.

In 1916 on a summer vacation, Dalí encountered modern painting, and soon he was trying some of the techniques he had seen. The next year he began a formal study of drawing under Professor Juan Nuñez at the Municipal School of Drawing in Figueras. And in 1918, the city of Figueras presented two exhibits of Dalí's paintings in the upper foyer of the Teatro Municipal, sponsored by his father. In this same period Dalí began experimenting with impressionism and pointillism.

Back to Pre WW I European Art

To see more of the development of Dali, just scroll down.

 Salvador Dalí
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí

born: Figueras, Spain; 2 May 1904
died: Barcelona, Spain; 23 January 1989

1920s

In February of 1921 Dalí’s mother died. Dalí, age 17, moves to Madrid to study in the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts. That year, Dalí also made friends with Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

In 1923 Dalí was suspended from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts because he lead a student protest against the appointment of a mediocre painter to the post of professor. Lorca, whose charisma always put him in charge, and who with Dalí led the local group of forward looking artistic students (Lorca was a writer, others worked in play production, drawing, sculpture, and music). Lorca and Dalí became were close friends. Again causing trouble Dalí was imprisoned for 35 days in the Garner for subversion; he considered it a badge of honor.

After his imprisonment Dalí returned to Figueras; Garcia Lorca came for an extended visit, and lived with the Dalí family. Dalí had turned 20 and he tried to persuade his father that he should go to Paris to continue his studies. In the shadow of WW I, his father was not convinced. However to explore possibilities his father arranged a trip to visit Brussels and Paris with Dalí, his aunt, and his sister. In Paris, Dalí visited Versailles, the art museums, Miró and Picasso. Mañuel Ortiz, a friend Garcia Lorca, introduced Dalí to Picasso

In 1925, Dalí's first real one-man show is held at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona. He received considerable local notice as a leading young Catalan painter. At the end of that summer, Dalí returns to the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. The next year, Dalí's second one-man show was held at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona and Dalí was expelled from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts for refusal to take his final examination on grounds that he knew more than the professors.

In 1927 Dalí, at 23, serves nine months military service, he and Lorca remain best friends.

Garcia Lorca
and
Salvador Dalí
about 1927

Dalí does theater designs, including Lorca’s Mariana Pineda. Toward the end of the year, the relationship between Dalí and Lorca cooled.

In 1928, on Dalí’s second visit to Paris, Miró introduces him to Dadaists and Surrealists group.

In the late 20s, Dalí developed his own photo realist painting style with subject matter that is characteristic of a dream reality. The symbols in the pictures are often drawn from Freudian symbolism and from Dalí's own developing symbolic vocabulary. He was both attracted and horrified by sex. He was obsessed with large cocks (represented by baguettes), fellatio, and sodomy. He used a lion head to represented his own sexual hunger. These images and along with several others run as symbolic leitmotifs through Dalí's early art. In later life Dalí tended to replace these personal leitmotifs with less gooey, more intellectual ones.

The year 1929 was Dalí's big year: First Dalí and Buñuel made the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. Camera work on the film was done in the spring in Paris, and at that time Dalí met Tristan Tzara, and the remainder of the surrealist crowd. That summer René Magritte and his wife, Luis Buñuel, and the French poet Paul Éluard with his wife Gala came to Cadaqués to visit Dalí. Gala Éluard's full name was Helena Devulina Diakanoff; she was the daughter of a Russian lawyer. Dalí immediately fell madly in love with Gala, and within a week he proposed marriage in a walk along the beach. She agreed to divorcing her husband and marrying Dalí.

The picture of Éluard shown above was finished just after Dalí had seducced Éluard's wife. Salvador's liaison with a married woman along with other actions that seem to discredit the Dalí family angered his father and finally resulted a family split. With this split, he also lost his father's monetary support.

If you are lost as to where all this happened, check out the map of Dalí Territory; click on the map for an enlargement!

1930s

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, His paintings began to sell. Dalí's public behavior became more and more bizarre. Which was great for marketing. He created a theory for his art which he called the "paranoiac-critical method".

In 1930 he bought a fisherman's cottage at Port Lligat, near Cadaqués. Throughout the 30s he commuted between France and Spain, living part of the year in each country. He inhabited Paris to enhance his reputation and sell art. He lived in Spain to work and be with Gala.

In 1933, collectors and friends form "The Zodiaque" group, whose sole purpose is to subsidize Dalí, now completely cut off from his father's allowance and short of funds. Julien Levy Gallery, New York, organizes Dalí’s first one-man show in the United States.

In January of 1934 Gala and Dalí got married in a civil ceremony. Dalí and Gala then made their first trip to New York, and Dalí created a series of special illustrations of New York which appeared in the American Weekly from February to July. He had a solo exhibition of his paintings in New York, which turned out to be a great success both financially and critically.

In the middle of the thirty's, Dalí began to draw symbolically on The Angelus of Millet. It seems that Dalí and his critics were expressing a reservation about the whole symbolist vocabulary and it's meaning in art. While Dalí's dreamscapes were interesting -- there was (and still is) a feeling of vacancy in the images. There are emotional resonances, but these do not come from the symbolism so much as the art itself, and so Dalí's art always has a touch meaninglessness, superficiality, and insincerity. Dalí uses the Angelus of Millet to inject a sincere symbol. Which he continued to use in this way throughout his life. But, no symbol of sincerity can replace the real thing.

At the same time Dalí began to have arguments with the other Surrealists and in particular with André Breton, whose dictatorial style had raised Dalí's hackles. But the Surrealists needed his marketing skills and his infamy to make their art shows a success. So the hatchet was buried for a while.

In Spain of July 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca, Dalí's teenage friend went to vacation in Granada. In early August, in some unknown event, Lorca was imprisioned by Franco's Fascists, who were in control of Granada. He was judged, found guilty of treason, and at dawn on the 18th Frederico Garcia Lorca along with a schoolmaster and two bullfighters were executed by a Fascist firing squad in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains near Granada. The cause for killing Lorca was not clear, he was not politically active against Franco, but he had left-wing friends, and he actively declared and promoted a gay lifestyle.

Dalí left Spain just before the Spanish Civil War started and visits America for the second time. He is honored by the Americans with a Time magazine cover picture.

In 1937, Dalí visited Hollywood and wrote a screen play for the Marx Brothers. The Surrealists condemned his favorable comments on Hitler.

By the end of the thirties Dalí and the Surrealists were at complete odds. The Surrealists were unhappy with Dalí's infatuation with Nazism and Hitler. André Breton calls Dalí: "Avida Dollars", an anagram for 'Salvador Dalí' and a somewhat jealous, although generally accurate, remark on Dalí's commercial success. A remark that Dalí considered a complement. He was always proud of his acquisitive nature and his lack of generosity. Not that he didn't spend a lot of money on Gala and himself.

In November of 1939, Bacchanal, a ballet, is presented at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Dalí had written the libretto, done the set design; choreography for the ballet was by Leonide Massine.

1940s

In 1940 The Dalís flee from Arcachon, France, shortly before the Nazi invasion, taking the SS Excambion from Lisbon to the United States, paid for by Picasso. They remain in exile in the States until 1948, arriving first at the Hampton Manor in Virginia (the home of Dalí's friend Caresse Crosby), then traveling between the Del Monte Lodge in Pebble Beach, California, and the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Most of the 1940s the Dalís lived in exile in the United States.

In 1946 Dalí worked on a Walt Disney cartoon (which was never finished), and also on Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. They didn't return to Paris until 1948 well after the war, and recovery had begun.

Part II of Dalí, continuing the story after World War II.

Back to European Art between the world wars
20th Century European Art
20th Century Overview