Salvador Dali
Painter — born 1904
Salvador Dali was a Spanish painter who was an advocate of surrealism.
Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter whose six-decade career produced one of the most-iconic Surrealist bodies of work in 20th-century Western art history. He was born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. His older brother (also named Salvador) had died nine months before his birth — a circumstance that shaped Dalí's lifelong identity. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid (1922–1926), where he was eventually expelled for telling examiners he knew more about Raphael than they did.
His shift to Surrealism came in 1929 when he joined the Surrealist group in Paris led by André Breton. His 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory — featuring the melting pocket-watches draped over a barren Catalonian landscape — became one of the foundational works of Surrealism and one of the most-recognized paintings in 20th-century Western art. The 1929 collaboration with Luis Buñuel on the 17-minute Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou — including the eye-slicing-with-razor opening sequence — became one of the foundational documents of Surrealist cinema.
His subsequent body of work spanned painting, sculpture, jewelry, theater design, and film. Major paintings included Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936), The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), and the Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951). His 1934 expulsion from the Surrealist movement (over his ambivalent stance toward fascism and his capitalistic commercial activities) shaped his subsequent public persona — including the upturned waxed mustache, the eccentric public behaviors, and his 1965 New York City Bonwit Teller window-display performance.
He married Russian-born Gala Dalí (Elena Ivanovna Diakonova) in 1934 — the 53-year marriage that lasted until her 1982 death produced the Dalí-Gala creative partnership. He died on January 23, 1989, at age 84, in Figueres, Catalonia. The Dalí Theatre-Museum in his birthplace Figueres — designed and overseen by Dalí himself — is one of the most-visited art museums in Spain.
His name Salvador is from the Spanish word for "savior" — anchored in Catholic tradition through Saint Savior. Salvador has been continuously among the most-popular Spanish-American boys' names for decades.
About the name Salvador
Gender: Male · Origin: Spanish
Savior.