Salvador Dalí is one of the most famous and recognizable characters in Modern art history as much for his handlebar moustache and bold attire as for his dream-inspired compositions. One of Surrealism's founders, his artwork has been widely reproduced and has become heavily commercialized, which was partly due to Dalí's eagerness to occupy the public eye. His behavioral antics (such as adopting wildcats) ensured continual press coverage. As a result, Dalí has been seen by some as a charlatan, an artist who played at insanity and was, at heart, a narcissist. However, in recent years, several key retrospectives have encouraged reassessment of his technical skill. His exploration of automatic painting and his use of symbolic imagery influenced several Abstract Expressionists.

• Salvador Dalí was an incredibly prolific artist; his output includes paintings, sculptures, book illustration, jewelry, printmaking, and film. He collaborated with Luis Bunuel on the Surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), and designed the set for a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944), several autobiographies, and was also an inventor and a goldsmith. His cross-genre practice was indicative of the Surrealist belief in expression by any means possible.
• Dalí was in agreement with André Breton's theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for a more productive method of tapping the unconscious, which he termed "critical paranoia," a state in which one could cultivate delusion while maintaining sanity. While Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock admired, and in some instances emulated, Dalí's automatism as a conceptual practice, members of the New York School chose not to work in Dalí's representational style.
• Dalí's eccentric persona, which helped him garner fame as much as the quality of his work, was considered part of his art practice. The Dadaists and Surrealists placed emphasis on media coverage and believed that the attention one received following an exhibition was as crucial a part of the project as the work on exhibit.

Dalí was born in Figueras, a small town outside Barcelona, to a well-to-do family. His larger-than-life persona started early: he had his first drawing lessons at ten years old, and claims that his "violent childhood included hysterical outbursts and acts of rage towards his family and playmates." Throughout his life he retained his love of Catalan culture, namely affinities for fantasy and instinct, and the landscape surrounding Figueras made its way into several key paintings throughout Dalí's career. He entered the Madrid School of Fine Arts in 1921.

In Madrid, Dalí experimented with Impressionist and Pointillist styles, but abandoned these techniques after he won a bet that he could "paint a prize-winning Pointillist picture by splashing paint at a canvas from a distance of three feet," (Soby, p.4). In 1920, Dalí visited Paris where he became greatly interested in Futurist attempts to recreate motion and to show objects from simultaneous, multiple angles. In exploring this style, Dalí began to consider a means of dramatically reinterpreting reality and altering perception. He also discovered the psychoanalytic concepts of Freud as well as metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico, and consequently began using psychoanalytical methods of mining the subconscious to generate imagery. By the time he was expelled from the art academy in 1924, Dalí was already exhibiting work locally, and had been adopted into a social circle that included Luis Bunuel, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Maria Mallo.

In the latter 1920s, Dalí was practicing Cubist styles and was deeply influenced by Picasso, whom he personally met in Paris in 1929. That same year, at the Galerie Goemans in Paris, Dalí exhibited canvases that explored symbolism and his interest in the subconscious. Through this, he met Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, and André Breton, who wrote the essay for Dalí's catalog. Soon after, Dalí moved to Paris, and was invited by Breton to join the Surrealists. For the next several years, Dalí's paintings were notably illustrative as he honed his theories about paranoia's importance as subject matter. He painted bodies, bones, and symbolic objects that reflected sexualized fears of father figures and impotence, as well as symbols that referred to the passing of time. During this period, he also worked on the film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which meditated on abject obsessions. His subject matter was so sexually and politically shocking that Dalí became infamous, his ignominy exacerbated by his outlandish personal style.

Dalí ascribed to Breton's theory of automatism, and claimed that he didn't know the meaning behind the symbols in his paintings. He credited his childhood as inspiration, and urged artists to be skeptical of modern technology in favor of intuitive, craft-based art-making techniques. As politics of war were at the forefront of Surrealist debates, Breton expelled Dalí from the Surrealists in 1934 due to differing views on General Franco and fascism. In 1937, Dalí moved to Italy, and practiced more traditional painting styles that drew from his love of canonized painters, like Gustave Courbet and Jan Vermeer, though his impassioned themes and subjects remained as bizarre as ever.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí's paintings focused on religious themes and his abiding interest in the supernatural. He aimed to portray space as a subjective reality, and many of his paintings from this period show objects and figures at extremely foreshortened angles. He continued employing his "paranoiac-critical" method, which entailed working long, arduous hours in the studio and expressing his dreams directly on the canvas in manic bouts of energy. In 1955 he returned to Spain and became quite reclusive, but continued to paint until his death in the 1980s. His paintings became increasingly likened to Renaissance masterworks, and he had many other creative outlets: he designed jewelry, sets for theater, worked in fashion design and collaborated with Chanel, and much more. These endeavors led to further commercialization of his work, though it has been recently academically reassessed in several large-scale exhibitions.

Dalí's manner of revealing the gap between reality and illusion influenced all manner of Modern artists. Beyond developing his own symbolic language, he elaborated a way to represent the inner mind. Dalí is considered one of the major Surrealists who used shock and unease to illustrate moments of pleasure, and in this his work remains highly contemporary. Though some second generation Surrealists, like Joseph Cornell, remained working in representational modes, the Abstract Expressionists mainly drew from Dalí's belief in mining the subconscious. Painters, such as Robert Motherwell, who first showed as Surrealists at Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery also deeply admired Dalí's way of personalizing the political and vice versa.


Below are Salvador Dalí's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad."

"I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occurring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground."
>From Dalí's book, My Secret Life: