Cooper Hewitt says...
Surrealist painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904 – 1989) was born in Figueres, Spain. He studied at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid, where he met Luis Buñel and Federico García Lorca, which whom he would later collaborate. He experimented with several avante-garde styles, including Cubism and Futurism, and began showing his work at galleries in Barcelona and Madrid. He was dismissed from the Academy, however, in 1926, for challenging the authority of the faculty.
In 1929, he collaborated with Buñel on a short avant-garde film, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which brought both artists to the attention of the Surrealists. In their circle, he met artists André Breton, René Magritte, and Hans Arp, as well as his future wife, muse, and manager, Gala. Like the Surrealists, he was fascinated and inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, but he did not share their political agenda, and broke with the group in 1939.
After France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Dalí and Gala fled to the United States, where they remained until 1948. During these years, the artist was given his first retrospective exhibition, with Joan Miró, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He created dream sequences for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film, Spellbound, and collaborated with Walt Disney on an unfinished animation project, Destino.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dalí became interested in physics, along with a growing spirituality. He began painting in a style he called Nuclear Mysticism, which included both religious and scientific imagery. Due to illness and injury, he painted less and less in his final years, but remained an international celebrity. In his lifetime, two museums dedicated to his work were inaugurated: The Dalí Museum, now in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Teatre-Museu Dalí, in Figueres, Spain.
