Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres, Catalonia, and trained at Madrid’s Royal Academy before relocating to Paris, where he joined the Surrealist circle and became one of the movement’s most celebrated and controversial figures. His partnership with Gala Éluard, whom he met during this period, became the central personal and creative relationship of his life. His mature work of the 1930s, including The Persistence of Memory (1931), embodied his “paranoiac-critical method”, a process of cultivating irrational and hallucinatory associations and rendering them with the precision of a classical draftsman.

After relocating to the United States during World War II, Dalí became an international cultural phenomenon. He collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney, worked in theater, fashion, photography, and commercial design, and cultivated an eccentric public persona that blurred the boundaries between art and performance. Although his commercial success led to a contentious break with the Surrealists, Dalí continued to experiment throughout his career. His later work increasingly explored religion, science, mathematics, and what he termed “nuclear mysticism.”

One of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century, Dalí is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The Dalí Theatre-Museum in his native Figueres, conceived and designed by the artist, houses the largest and most diverse collection of his work and was considered by Dalí to be his final great artistic creation.