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Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain. This area of Spain was dear to Dalí; he lived with his wife nearby for his adult life. Much of his artwork reflected his affection for this Spanish area as well.

Dalí attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Despite a tenuous relationship with his father, he was well supported in his artistic endeavours by both of his parents. They built him an art studio before he went to school, and later, they organized a showing of his charcoal drawings at their family home.

His first moment of international recognition came when three of his paintings were shown in Pittsburgh at the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in 1928. Three years later, he produced his best-known work: The Persistence of of Memory (this is the one with the melting clocks).

Despite his position as the most prominent member of the Surrealist movement, Dalí was “expelled” from the group in 1934 because his apolitical views clashed with the views of the group as a whole. He would not fully oppose the Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco, and this was commonly believed to be the reason for his expulsion, though the group officially stated that Dalí was expelled due to “counter-revolutionary activity involving the celebration of fascism under Hitler”.

In the period that Dalí was an official member of the surrealist movement, his work focused on three themes: 1) man’s universe and sensations, 2) sexual symbolism and 3) ideographic imagery. A few years after his expulsion – around 1940 – his work shifted, and his painting style became more focused on “science and religion”. This period included a series of nineteen large canvases, all with similar themes.

Dalí and his wife Gala spent 1940-1948 in the United States; this was primarily to escape World War II. In 1942, his autobiography was published, titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.

A number of years after their return to Spain, in 1974, Dalí opened the Teatro Museo in his hometown of Figueres. Unfortunately, it was only a few years later that Dalí developed a motor disorder that caused trembling and weakness in his hands. In 1980, he could no longer hold a paintbrush, and so, he was unable to fully express himself and had to retire from painting.

Dalí’s health deteriorated further after the death of his wife Gala in 1982. Seven years later, on January 23, 1989, Salvador Dalí died of heart failure with respiratory complications in the town of his birth.

The Alice image: 

Dali uses the same image of Alice in all of his illustrations: that of a young girl in a long dress holding up a skipping rope. This particular image had been used by Dali before – in a painting used as a frontispiece for Paul Éluard’s book Nuits Partagées in 1935, and in Landscape with Girl Skipping Rope, 1936. Dalí retired this image in 1944, only reviving its use in 1969 for his Alice illustrations (xxviii). This image became associated with Alice, and in the 1980s, he released a sculpture of an adolescent Alice, still skipping rope (xiii-xiv).

Works Cited