Salvador Dali: The Complete Story
Salvador Dali (1904 to 1989) was the Spanish Surrealist who painted melting clocks, waxed his moustache into two upward spikes, and turned his own life into the strangest performance in modern art.
He believed he was his dead brother reborn, worshipped a wife he could only visit by invitation, got thrown out of Surrealism for loving money, and ended up buried under the floor of his own museum.
Behind the circus was a serious painter. Here is the whole, very odd story.
Dali in sixty seconds
Lived: 1904 to 1989, born and died in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
Famous for: The Persistence of Memory and its melting clocks.
Movement: Surrealism, until he was expelled from it.
His muse: Gala, his wife and manager.
The brand: the moustache, the stunts, the showmanship.
The boy named after a dead brother
Dali was named Salvador after an older brother who had died as a baby, nine months before Dali was born.
When he was five, his parents took him to the grave and told him he was his brother reborn. He believed it, and he spent his life convinced he was a kind of double, a replacement haunted by the first Salvador. That strangeness was there from the start.
Madrid, Lorca and a sliced eyeball
As a student in Madrid he fell in with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel.
With Bunuel he made the short film Un Chien Andalou, which opens with a razor slicing a woman's eye. It announced a new kind of art that wanted to shock the rational mind awake. He was expelled from his art academy not long after.
Surrealism and the paranoiac method
Dali joined the Surrealists and became their most famous member. He painted dreams with the crisp realism of an old master, so the impossible looked photographic.
He called his technique the paranoiac critical method, a way of inducing his own hallucinations and painting what he saw. The movement he supercharged is explained in what Surrealism is. Why he became its face is here: why Salvador Dali is famous.
The melting clocks
In 1931 he painted The Persistence of Memory, the small canvas of soft watches drooping over a dead landscape.
It became the single most famous image of Surrealism. Dali claimed the limp clocks came to him while staring at a runny camembert cheese melting in the sun.
Gala, the wife he worshipped
In 1929 Dali met Gala, a Russian woman then married to the poet Paul Eluard. She became his wife, model, business manager and obsession.
He signed some works with both their names and credited her with keeping him alive and sane. Late on he bought her a castle at Pubol, and agreed he could only visit her there with her written permission. It was love as devotion and contract at once.
Avida Dollars, thrown out of Surrealism
Dali loved money and fame, and it cost him his movement.
The Surrealist leader Andre Breton, disgusted by his greed and his flirtation with Franco's Spain, expelled him and coined a cruel anagram of his name: Avida Dollars, eager for dollars. Dali shrugged it off, declaring that he himself was Surrealism.
The greatest showman in art
Dali understood publicity better than any artist of his century.
He waxed his moustache into two cosmic spikes, walked an anteater through Paris on a leash, gave interviews from a diving suit, designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo and dreamed up a sequence for a Hitchcock film. The moustache alone has its own story: Salvador Dali's mustache. More oddities are in surprising facts about Dali.
The fire, and the crypt beneath his museum
Gala's death in 1982 broke him. He moved into the castle at Pubol and stopped eating well.
In 1984 a fire in his bedroom left him badly burned. He died in Figueres in 1989, and was buried in a crypt under the stage of his own Theatre Museum, where visitors walk over him every day. The full story is here: how Salvador Dali died.
Common questions about Salvador Dali
What is Dali most famous for? The Persistence of Memory and its melting clocks.
Where was Dali from? Figueres, in Catalonia, Spain, born in 1904.
How did Dali die? Heart failure in 1989, aged 84.
Was Dali a Surrealist? Yes, its most famous one, until he was expelled.
Did Dali do drugs? He claimed not to, with the line, I do not do drugs, I am drugs.
Did Dali have children? No. He and Gala had none.
Was Dali religious? Later in life, yes, he embraced Catholicism.
Where is the Dali museum? His Theatre Museum is in Figueres, and another major one is in Florida.
Genius or the greatest act ever
People still argue whether Dali was a true visionary or the most brilliant self promoter who ever lived.
The honest answer is both at once. He could paint like a Renaissance master and sell like a circus, and he never let anyone decide where the art stopped and the act began. His sharpest lines are in Salvador Dali quotes.
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