The Global Art
Salvador Dalí
Salvador
Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 –
January 23, 1989), was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia
(Spain).
Dalí 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 Dalí'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.
Dalí 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, Dalí 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.
Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:47 am GMT in the town of Figueres, in the
Empordà region close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older
brother, also named Salvador (b. October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis,
nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a
middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinarian approach was tempered
by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors.
When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents
that he was his brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe. Of his
brother, Dalí said: "… [we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we
had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but
conceived too much in the absolute."