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Salvador Dali
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"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?”
Salvador Dali was born Salvador Domenec Felip Jacint Dali Domenech on May 11, 1907, in Figueres, Spain - the same Catalan town where the Dali Museum is located today.
Dali was a surrealist painter of bizarre dreamlike images and unforgettable landscapes - executed with a photographic attention to detail.
His first major work was The Great Masturbator (1929) in which he was influenced by the writings of the Psychologist Sigmund Freud whose aim was to "agitate the sleep of mankind".
Salvador Dali’s most famous work is The Persistence of Memory (1931). Dali had formulated his paranoiac-critical method, cultivating self-induced psychotic hallucinations in order to create art.
"The difference between a madman and me" Dali said, "is that I am not mad!"
Salvador Dali often clashed with André Breton and other members of the "official" Surrealist circle over the content of his paintings and his right-wing views; he was kicked out of the group in 1934.
Breton coined a brilliant anagram for Dali's name: Avida Dollars (which more or less translates to "Eager for Dollars"), Dali shot back "the only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist."
Salvador Dali was an artist of great talent and imagination. He admitted a love of doing unusual things to draw attention, so much so that his eccentric theatrical manner sometimes overshadowed his artwork.
He was however a creative genius and a showman. Not only did he work on surrealist films with Luis Brunel, but also designed clothes, stage sets and furniture.
In 1940 Salvador Dali moved to New York and wrote the secret life of Salvador Dali 1942-1944. Dali died in 1989 at the age of 85, leaving his entire fortune and works to the Spanish state.
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