Salvador Dali

ONE OF THE most famous, or notorious, artists of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí was an eccentric from his earliest days. As a child he spent long solitary hours in a washtub filled with water in the family laundry room; as an adult he cultivated publicity with his provocative self-advertising, once arriving at the Sorbonne in a Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflowers.

Dalí claimed that his flamboyant exhibitionism was the source of his creative energy. Having immersed himself in painting in his teens, he was already experimenting with avant-garde styles as a student at the Madrid School of Fine Arts from 1921. It was his discovery of Surrealism that provided the ideal stimulus for his bizarre and introspective imagination; even before he formally joined the Surrealist movement in 1929, works such as Apparatus and Hand showed his adoption of Surrealist ideas. Dalírefined these into a method which he named ‘critical paranoia’, and described his paintings as ‘handpainted dream photographs’, combining a meticulously detailed technique with irrational hallucinatory imagery.

In the later 1930s Dalí traveled both to Italy and to the USA to avoid the Spanish Civil War, finally settling in America in 1940. Here he drew himself into the life of a celebrity, designing jewelry and stage sets, painting society portraits, and working with Hitchcock in Hollywood. His paintings focused on religious and scientific themes, but few of them possessed the creative vigor of his earlier work.