Dalí (y Domenech), Salvador (Felipe Jacinto)

(born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain—died Jan. 23, 1989, Figueras) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer. He studied in Madrid and Barcelona before moving to Paris, where, in the late 1920s, after reading Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery, he joined the Surrealist group of artists. Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist. His paintings depict a dream world in which commonplace objects, painted with meticulous realism, are juxtaposed, deformed, or metamorphosed in bizarre ways. In his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), limp watches melt in an eerie landscape. With Luis Bu he made the Surrealist films Un Chien andalou (1928) and L'Âge d'or (1930). Expelled from the Surrealist movement when he adopted a more academic style, he later designed stage sets, jewelry, interiors, and book illustrations. His highly accessible art—and the publicity attracted by the eccentricity, exhibitionism, and flamboyant behaviour he cultivated throughout his life—made him extremely wealthy.

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