Salvador: Salvador Dalí and Dalí Essay examples

Submitted By Dominick-Mcnee
Words: 1697
Pages: 7

Salvador Dali
BY : Dominick McNee
Early Years
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 am in the

town of Figures, in the Emporda, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother was also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), he had died nine months earlier, on
August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle­class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors.
When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by

his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, "...[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections. He was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.”
Images of his long­dead brother would reappear embedded in his later works, including
Portrait
of My Dead Brother (1963).Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In
1949, she published a book about her brother,
Dalí As Seen By His Sister
. Dalí attended drawing school In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaques with the family of Ramon
Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.
The next year,

Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919, a site he would return to decades later. In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer when Dalí was 16 years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.” After her death, Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt. 1929­world war II

August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong and primary muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala,born
Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul
Eluard In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called his paranoiac­critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity. Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala, and saw his connection to the
Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The final straw was when Don Salvador read in a
Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ
, with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait".Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would be disinherited , and that he should never set foot in Cadaqués again. The following summer, Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at
Port Lligat
. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea. Dalí's father would eventually relent and come to accept his son's companion.n 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works,
The
Persistence of Memory
,which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches
.
The general interpretation of the