A well-assorted cocktail of genius and delirium, painter of the surreal and dreamlike worlds, Salvador Dalì had a life marked by strangeness from the beginning. Born in Figueras on 11 May 1904 – his full name is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, Marquis of Pùbol – three years after the death of his first brother, his father thought it well to give him the same name, perhaps due to never having been able to forget the firstborn. A somewhat "sick" circumstance, which certainly didn't help the mental balance of little Salvador, who, born in Catalonia, as a teenager, exhibited some paintings at the municipal theater of his town, gaining significant critical appreciation. In 1921 he enrolled at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he became friends with the director Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico Garcìa Lorca. With the latter he spent the summer in Cadaqués in 1925. The following year he stayed in Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, and was expelled from the Academy. His first painting is characterized by futurist, cubist influences, and above all by the work of Giorgio De Chirico. In the following years, his artistic and intellectual partnership with Lorca and Buñuel produced theatrical and cinematographic scenography works, such as the two famous films "Un chien andalou" and "L'âge d'or". On the pictorial level, his attention was soon drawn to the reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Miró and Tanguy, the masters of the unconscious translated on canvas. In 1929 he finally joined the Surrealist group and in 1931, together with Breton, he elaborated the "Surrealist objects with a symbolic function". But Salvador Dalí's surrealism is nonetheless highly personalized: inspired by De Chirico and imbued with references to Freudian psychoanalysis, it is characterized by a meticulous, smooth and cold technique. In 1930 he published "La femme visible", an essay dedicated to Gala, his wife since 1929, model and muse for life. This book marks a new orientation of Dalí, who begins to combine an almost academic realism with a deforming, sometimes macabre delirium. A few years later he clashed with the Surrealists regarding the painting "The Enigma of William Tell", until in 1936 there was a first break with the Breton group, which would become definitive three years later. Meanwhile Dalí had participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris and Amsterdam. Between 1940 and 1948 he lived in New York, together with Gala Éluard, dealing with fashion and design. In these years he had the opportunity to exhibit his works at the Museum of Modern Art together with Miró and to contribute, with the design of the scenes, to Alfred Hitchcock's film "I will save you". At the end of his US stay he returns to Europe together with Gala. In 1949 he continued his scenographic activity for cinema collaborating with Luchino Visconti. In the following decade he exhibited in Italy, in Rome and Venice, and in Washington. In 1961 the Ballet de Gala was staged in Venice, with choreography by Maurice Béjart. There are many exhibitions in the following years, in New York, Paris, London, up to the important anthology in Madrid and Barcelona in 1983. Seven years later he exhibited his stereoscopic works at the Guggenheim Museum and in May 1978 he was nominated a member of the Academie des Beaux-Artes of Paris. The following year a Dalí retrospective was held at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, then transferred to the Tate Gallery in London. On 10 June 1982 Gala died and in July of the same year he was awarded the title of "archese of Pùbol” In May 1983 he painted “The swallow's tail”, his last painting. In 1984 he suffered severe burns from the fire in his room at the castle of Pùbol, where he now resides permanently. Salvador Dalì died on January 23, 1989 in the Galatea tower due to a stroke. In accordance with his wishes, he is buried in the crypt of the Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueras. In his will, he leaves all his works and properties to the Spanish state. A large posthumous retrospective is organized in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, then transferred to the Kunsthaus Zurich.
