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Eccentric, anarchist, monarchist… the unconventional Catalan artist Dalí played a crucial role in ushering contemporary Spanish art onto the international scene. A madman for some, a genius for others, no one would dispute that he was a character unto himself. 2004 marks the centennial anniversary of his birth. The resulting Year of Dalí offers a retrospective of his long and brilliant career as an artist.Jacinto Felipe Salvador Dalí i Domenèch was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres (Girona), where he first studied drawing. In 1921, he enrolled at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Through the school’s student residence, he met the playwright Federico García Lorca (who would go on to become his closest friend), the painter Rafael Barradas and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, among other young talents then joining the ranks of the many avant-garde art movements underway at the time.
In his early years as an artist, Dalí incorporated Cubism, metaphysics and Realism into his art, giving rise to diverse family portraits and key works such as The Breadbasket.
In 1929, he set himself up in Paris, where
Joan Miró introduced him to the Surrealists, a group of which he soon became a prominent member.
Gala
When Dalí first met the Russian Elena Diakonova, otherwise known as Gala, she was married to his friend, the French poet Paul Eluárd. She swiftly became his muse and he immortalized her in countless portraits. Despite his unstable sex life, Dalí was instantly enraptured by Gala, who was to become his greatest passion.
For Dalí, it was love at first sight.
Gala had visited Dalí at his home in Cadaqués, accompanied by her husband. The following morning, mad with desire and hoping to attract her, Dalí shaved his armpits and painted them blue, cut up his shirt and smeared himself with a mixture of fishtail and goat manure.
“When I found her, I could not talk to her. I was stunned by her smile, crazed, overcome by a cataclysm, fanaticism, an abyss, terror…”
Salvador Dalí, The Passions According to Dalí.
Perceptive and likewise attracted to Dalí, the next day, Gala took the painter's hand and told him gravely, “My dear, let us never again be separated.”
Dalí's conservative and authoritarian father, with whom he still lived, was radically opposed to their relationship.
But no one could stand in the way of their passion. For Dalí, the epitome of Gala’s eroticism was a birthmark on her left ear. “I touch her earlobe and she becomes my Aladdin's lamp.”
The Catalan artist swore that he never had sexual relations with anyone other than Gala:
"Before I met her, I was convinced I was impotent [...] When I bathed, I would look at my companions' members and realize with sadness that they were all larger than mine. But when I was with Gala, I discovered that I am normal in that sense. Without her, I would have gone mad." (The Passions According to Dalí)
The best artistic testimony to their relationship can be found in Púbol, at the Gala-Dalí Castle Home and Museum.
Thanks to his talent for self-promotion and his eccentric behavior, Dalí soon managed to become the most famous member of the Surrealists. His work from this period (The Great Masturbator, The Persistence of Memory) is considered by critics to be his best. Indeed, it was in this period when Dalí concocted his paranoiac-critical method, according to which the artist must systematically resort to the irrational, the absurd, while at the same time rendering his or her vision lucid.
In 1937, Dalí traveled to Italy, where he first encountered the classics, which led to his incorporation of religious themes and greater academicism in his depictions of the human body. Indeed, this application of rigorous academic technique to depictions of strange, dream-like and hallucinogenic subject matter is perhaps the most salient feature of Dalí's paintings.
From 1940 to 1955, Dalí lived in the U.S., where he achieved significant renown. Upon returning to Spain, the artist chose to lead a reclusive life, making few public appearances.
Politics
A proclaimed monarchist ("the only way to express my anarchism"), Dalí supported Franco and had problems with his fellow members of the Surrealist movement, who were mainly communist intellectuals. The first split would occur between Dalí and the French poet Eluárd, whose wife, Gala, Dalí had stolen. Both in Paris and New York, many members of the intellectual community shunned him for his political stances.
Dalí’s ideological differences with other artists of his times did not, however, come between him and his great friend García Lorca; nor did they hinder his relationship with Luis Buñuel, another close friend and artistic reference.
As for Picasso, whatever relationship may have existed between the two geniuses is unknown. Of the Malaga-born artist, Dalí once said, “Picasso is Spanish, as am I! Picasso is a genius, as am I! Picasso is a communist, as I am not!” This was at a talk he gave at the María Guerrero theater in Madrid on November 11th, 1951, entitled Picasso and I.
"I am divine, monarchist, pro-Franco... I love money, dollars and Gala." What is clear is that, while Dalí did not participate in the Spanish Civil War himself, his sympathies lay with the Nationalists.
Main influences
In addition to the omnipresent Gala, Dalí had many other artistic influences, including:
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506): The Crucifixion of Christ is one of the two most widely explored subjects in art. One of the paintings from which Dalí may have drawn inspiration for his own Christs may have been The Crucifixion by the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna.
Federico García Lorca: Despite being ideological opposites, the author of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba was one of Dalí's closest friends and confidantes from childhood. During the Spanish Civil War, García Lorca was taken prisoner and shot by members of the pro-Franco faction.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828): One of the most important Spanish painters of all times, Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, which dealt with the Spanish war against Napoleonic France, may have been the fountain of inspiration for Dalí’s own The Face of War (1940-41).
Luis Buñuel: Like Dalí, Buñuel explored the world of dreams and the subconscious, using techniques that brought him close to Surrealism.
Leonardo da Vinci: La Gioconda (The Mona Lisa) and The Virgin on the Rocks served as the inspiration for Dalí’s The Last Supper.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): The father of psychoanalysis, a psychological method for treatment of neurosis based on the search for repressed tendencies and/or influences in an individual’s subconscious and the return thereof to the conscious realm through an analytic process. His book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was hugely influential among the Surrealists and, in particular, for Dalí.
Additional influences would include the German painter and naturalized French citizen, Max Ernst, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967), one of the leading figures in Surrealism, the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico and even
Pablo Picasso himself.
Dalí’s Legacy
Dalí died at the advanced age of 91 on January 23, 1989, in his hometown of Figueres.
To his final days, he was steadfast in his preference for certain subjects, including his hallmark melting clocks, open drawers, insects, mirrors, fish and elephants with spider’s legs. In addition to painting, he was also an accomplished sculptor, illustrator, jewellery designer, playwright and filmmaker in collaboration with Buñuel. Much of his work can be seen today at the Gala-Dalí Castle Home and Museum in Púbol; the Salvador Dalí Home Museum in Port Lligat, Cadaqués, where he spent his summers and painted many of his most important works; and, primarily, at the Dalí Museum and Theatre in Figueres. That said, it is perhaps in Barcelona where one of the largest and most important collections of the artist’s work can be found. Over 700 original pieces, including etchings, watercolors, photographs, oil paintings and sculptures, are on display at the major
Dalí Escultor (Dalí the Sculptor) exhibit, which opened in June 2002 and is curated by the collector
Juan Javier Bofill. The works on display at Sala Güell are all exclusive and held by private collectors, and this is the first time they are being shown in public. The exhibit aims to serve as a key reference point for the Surrealist artist in Barcelona in honor of the International Year of Dalí in 2004.