Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century. During his lifetime the public got a picture of a person who was eccentric and paranoid. His personality caused a lot of controversy throughout his life.
Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain to father Don Salvador Dali y Cusi and mother Felipa Domenech, in 1904. He was named after his older brother who had died nine months previous and his parents believe him to be the reincarnation of. In 1907, his sister, Ana Maria, was born.
Dali, was the only male in a female-dominated household, was pampered by his overprotective mother, grandmother, aunt, and nurse. All this attention was not enough for Dali, and he constantly sought ways to seek more. In 1910 His father enrolled Salvador at the State Primary School, under the teacher Esteve Trayter.
He purposely threw tantrums and would give himself coughing fits He would intentionally wet his bed to anger his father. Dali continued this until he was eight years old, when he realized he could anger his father much more by getting himself into trouble at school. At around ten years old Dali stopped acting out as much, and began to show an interest in art and made his first painting. By the time he was 15, he already began setting up his own art exhibition.
In 1916 Salvador spent time on the outskirts of Figueres, at the Molí de la Torre property, owned by the Pichot family, who were a family of intellectuals and artists. It was there, that he discovered Impressionism by studying the collection owned by the painter Ramon Pichot. After a mediocre primary school period ended, he began his secondary schooling at the Marist Brothers’ school and at Figueres grammar school in the autumn He also attended the classes taught by Juan Núñez at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueres.
Salvador took part in a group exhibition at the Societat de Concerts rooms in Figueres’ Municipal Theatre. During this time he and a group of friends started the Studium magazine where he publish some of his very first articles. He began his personal diary titled “Les Meves impression I records intims” ,( My Personal Impressions and Private Memories),and he continued writing it through the following year.
In 1921, 17-year-old Salvador Dali entered the Madrid Fine Arts School, hoping to fuel his interest in Futurism and Cubism. However, Dali ended up getting himself was suspended for a year after urging all students to rebel against the school’s rules.
In autumn of the following year he returned to the Academia de San Fernando from which he had been expelled, being now obliged to repeat an academic year
He took part in the First Exhibition of the Iberian Artists Society in Madrid, He presented his first individual exhibition in Barcelona while at Galeries Dalmau.
This was his period of rejecting the vanguard and questing for a pictorial tradition, essentially an Italian one. Over this academic year, 1925-1926, he did not return to the Academia de San Fernando. Federico García Lorca spent the holidays with Dalí in Cadaqués. At the end of 1926 the school decided to expel Dali permanently.
He traveled to Paris in 1929 and, through Joan Miró, came into contact with the group of surrealists headed by André Breton. Salvador developed an interest in Surrealism, and joined the movement. Dali began developing his method, which he eventually would name “Paranoiac-critical” and describe as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on critical and systematic objectivities of delirious associations and interpretations.”
In the next few years, Dali produced three paintings: in 1929 he painted ‘The Lugubrious Game’. In 1931 he finished work on the painting he is best known for, ‘The Persistence of Memory’; In 1932 he produced ‘Surrealist Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory’. Dali created his trademark “soft watches” that he is now famous for.