Salvador Dali was born in Figueres, in the Catalan region of Spain, in 1904. He died in the same town in 1989, after a long and theatrical career that turned him into one of the most photographed and quoted artists of the twentieth century. Between those two dates he produced thousands of works in nearly every medium and traveled extensively across Europe and the Americas.
Early years and education
Dali showed unusual artistic abilities as a child. He was admitted to the prestigious San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1922, where he met Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel. The three of them formed a small but intense circle that would shape Spanish modernist culture for the next decade. Dali was eventually expelled from the Academy after declaring that none of his teachers were qualified to examine him.
His early paintings show the influence of cubism, futurism and metaphysical art. By the late 1920s he had developed his own version of surrealism, more precise and more disturbing than the dreamlike paintings of Andre Masson or Max Ernst. The 1929 painting The Great Masturbator established him as a major surrealist figure almost overnight.
The surrealist years
Between 1929 and 1939 Dali produced most of the paintings he is now famous for: The Persistence of Memory, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, the various still lifes with crutches and ants. These works combined precise academic painting technique with imagery drawn from dreams, sexual anxieties and visual puns.
The same period saw his collaboration with Bunuel on two films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, both of which scandalized audiences and ensured the surrealists a permanent place in cultural history. By the late 1930s, however, Dali was at odds with the political wing of the surrealist movement, in particular with Andre Breton, who eventually expelled him from the group.
America and California
The Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II drove Dali and his wife Gala from Europe. They arrived in New York in 1940 and spent the next eight years in the United States. This is the period most relevant to the Dali17 collection, because Dali and Gala spent extended periods on the Monterey Peninsula during these years.
They first stayed at the Hotel Del Monte in 1941 and 1942. When the United States Navy took over the hotel as a training facility for the war effort, the Dalis moved to a house at the Del Monte Lodge in Pebble Beach, now known as the Lodge at Pebble Beach. They remained there off and on through 1948.
The California years were productive in unexpected ways. Dali wrote his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, during this time. He also developed friendships with Walt Disney, who later commissioned him to work on the animated short Destino, and with the entertainer Bob Hope. The mix of high modernist art and Hollywood celebrity that would define Dali's later public image took shape on the Monterey Peninsula.
Late career
After returning to Spain in 1948, Dali entered what he called his nuclear mystical period. The work became more religious, more concerned with classical themes, and more openly engaged with the science of the postwar era, especially quantum physics. Paintings like Christ of Saint John of the Cross and The Sacrament of the Last Supper belong to this phase.
He continued working until illness and the death of Gala in 1982 began to slow him down. The last years of his life were spent in a tower attached to his museum in Figueres, where he died of heart failure in 1989. The museum, which he designed himself, remains one of the most visited cultural institutions in Spain.
Why Dali still matters
Critics have always been divided on Dali. Some consider him a major painter whose technical skill and imaginative power put him in the line of the Spanish masters. Others see him as a marketing phenomenon who debased his own work through endless reproductions and signings. Both views have evidence on their side.
What is harder to dispute is his influence on visual culture. The melting clock is one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century, reproduced on everything from textbooks to coffee mugs. The visual vocabulary he developed, drawing on Freud, Catholic iconography and Catalan landscape, has shaped advertising, music videos and contemporary fantasy art in ways that have only become more visible with time.