Salvador Dalé

Dalé (1904-1989) is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century.

Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figuera in Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age and Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old. His art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School. In 1923 his father bought his son his first printing press.

Salvador Dali was originally a Cubist but became a Surrealist in 1929. He was welcomed into the group by Breton, who, in 1938, expelled him. Dalé abandoned the implicit Marxism of the "official" Surrealist while continuing to exploit Freudian imagery.

His is the nightmare world of man-size ants and limp pocket watches, meticulous in realistic detail, haunting in the inescapability of the horrific and even in his religious works, such as the Glasgow Crucifixion, unable to avoid the crude sensationalism of willful shock.

Perhaps his best works, in their extraordinary mixture of wild imagery and precise execution, are his pieces of jewelry, where the fantastic is enhanced by being allied successfully to precious materials.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure.