Dalí melted clocks and turned eccentricity into a brand
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 11 May 1904 to 23 January 1989, joined the Surrealists in 1929 and finished The Persistence of Memory in August 1931. Figueres-born and Madrid-trained, he painted, filmed, and performed a public self that irritated allies and critics alike.
Dalí was born in Figueres nine months after an older brother, also named Salvador, died of gastroenteritis, and he spent his life mythologising that double, saying they were alike as two drops of water but reflected differently. His father was a strict, anticlerical notary; his mother encouraged his art. He painted his sister Anna Maria 12 times between 1923 and 1926, played football in Cadaqués with future Barcelona stars Emili Sagi-Barba and Josep Samitier, and discovered modern painting through the family of Ramon Pichot, an artist who travelled often to Paris.
His father staged a show of his charcoal drawings at home, and at 14 he exhibited publicly at Figueres' Municipal Theatre, the building that would later become his museum. An uncle's bookshop in Barcelona supplied magazines on Cubism. His mother's death from cancer in February 1921, when he was 16, was the worst blow of his life; his father went on to marry her sister.
In Madrid from 1922, living at the Residencia de Estudiantes and studying at the San Fernando academy, he dressed as a long-haired dandy in knee breeches and grew close to Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, whose passion he said he rebuffed but whose friendship stayed intense until Lorca's killing in 1936. He studied the old masters at the Prado every Sunday, stood out as a Cubist in a city without any, and read Freud. His first solo show, at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in November 1925, was a success, and in April 1926 he met Picasso in Paris. Joan Miró introduced him to the Surrealists, and Yves Tanguy's influence was so strong that he reportedly admitted pinching everything from him.
Source: Salvador Dalí
