Salvador Dali

17Sep08

Mehehehe the week before was… Mid Autumn Festival! So I went with my mom to taka and we looked at mooncakes Then while she was looking at kimchi and all I went to opera gallery and saw some really cool work that I’ll talk about some other time. A few days ago I revisted the gallery and they changed the pieces! Most of them anyway. But whoa busy gallery.

Anyway, this was done in what that feels like aeons ago, but thank goodness I remember the url.

The biography of Salvador Dali, whose personality is wack.

Salvador Dali (1904-1084)

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born to a prestigous notary on 11th May 1904 in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain. His artistic talent as a young boy showed, and he received his first art lessons at the early age of ten. His teachers were then famous Spanish Impressionists, and one of them was Ramon Pichot, and the other an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School, who taught him after Pichot. In 1923, when Dali was nineteen, his father gave his son his first printing press.

Dali then began studying at the Madrid’s Royal Academy of Art but was later expelled for lack of discipline. His opinion had been that he was more qualified than those who mentored him, and because of this, he was booted out twice and never took the final examinations.

In Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, Dali had experimented with Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical art movements, but eventually joined the Surrealists in 1929. He became the most famous Surrealist as a result of his talent for self publicity. He cultivated an image of himself as one who was eccentric and an exhibitionist. An example of this was when he donned a diving suit and appeared at the opening London Surrealists Exhibition. Dali claimed that this was his source of creative energy. Dali took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but actively transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia’. Which referred to the world of unconciousness that is recalled in dreams.This theory was based and derived from those of phycologist Sigmend Freud.

In 1928, Dali visited Italy and adopted more traditional styles incorporated with political views, and this led Andre Breton, who was the supposed theoretical head of the Surrealists, to expel Dali from their Surrealist ranks, accusing the painter to support fascism and to have indulged in excessive self-proclamation and greed for money.

He later became a temporary item with Gala in 1932-1964, who became a very important figure in Dali’s life even though she was married. During their “peak” times, Gala had been an active sexual partner, compainion, muse, model, and business manager. She waa a Russian immigrant and was ten years senior to Dali. She later left her husband, Paul Eluard to follow Dali. However, the pair’s relationship became distanced though Gala continued to be Dali’s business manager in Europe to his expeditions in the States.

Dali had, by this time, left for United States to host various one-man shows. His first was in 1933 in New York, financially supported by Pablo Picasso with five hundred pounds. He chose to become a permanent resident in 1940 there in order to escape the effects of World War Two. He hosted a series of spectacular series of exhibitions and made a lot of money. This news reached the ears of Andre Breton, who comtemptously nicknamed Dali “Avida Dollars”, which aptly meant “greedy for dollars”, and was the rearrangement of Salvador Dali’s name. Dali became the darling of the American High Society because of his artistic prodigy.

In 1948, Dali and Gala returned to Europe. The male painter developed a lively interest in science, history and religion. He then intergrated various components which he picked up from science magazines into his art. Another source of his style-changing inspirations was from classical painters, Raphael and Velasquez, or the French painter Ingres. He commended this major change with words. “To be a surrealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses.”

1958 was the year when Dali began painting large historical paintings. The artist’s late art works combine more than ever his perfect and meticulous painting technique with his fantastic and limitless imaginations.

Since 1970, the artist had dedicated all of his energy to transform the former Municipal Theater into a museum and art gallery. Finally in the year of 1974, “Theatro Museo Dali” was officially opened.

In 1980, Dali was forced to retire due to palsy, a motor disorder that caused a permanent trembling and weakness of his hands. He was unable to hold a brush any more due to this wretched illness. The combined devastating knowledge that he could not follow his vocation and passion of painting and the news of Gala’s death in 1982 left Dali with deep depressions.

After Gala’s death he moved to Pubol, a castle he had purchased and decorated for Gala. In 1984, when he was lying in bed, a fire broke out and Dali suffered sever burns. Two years later, a pacemaker had to be surgically implanted.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 due to heart failure.

The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg in Florida/U.S.A.

This art museum was founded in 1971 by the Dali collector A. Reynolds Morse and his wife Eleanor. The collection was first exhibited in a building adjacent to their home in Cleveland/Ohio. In 1982, the museum was moved to St. Petersburg in Florida. It hosts 95 oil paintings including six of Dali’s eighteen large-sized historical paintings.

Dali Museum-Theater in Figueres, Spain

The Museum was the former Municipal Theater of Figueres. In 1918, when Salvador Dali was only fourteen years old, it had shown his first public exhibition.  

 

 

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