Salvador
Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech in
the Catalan town of Figueras, Spain, on May 11, 1904. In 1921 he enrolled
in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where
he became a friend of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel.
His first solo show was held in 1925 at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona.
In 1926 Dalí was expelled from the Academia and the following year
he visited Paris and met Pablo Picasso. He collaborated with Buñuel
on the film Un Chien andalou in 1928. At the end of the year he returned
to Paris and met Tristan Tzara and Paul Eluard. About this time Dalí
produced his first Surrealist publications and illustrated the works of
Surrealist writers and poets. His first solo show in the United States
took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933.
Dalí
was censured by the Surrealists in 1934. Toward the end of the decade
he made several trips to Italy to study the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In 1940 Dalí fled to the United States, where he worked
on theatrical productions, wrote, illustrated books, and painted. A major
retrospective of his work opened in 1941 at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and traveled throughout the United States.
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In 1942 Dalí
published his autobiography and began exhibiting at M. Knoedler and Co.
in New York. He returned to Europe in 1948, settling in Port Lligat, Spain.
His first paintings with religious subjects date from 194849. In
1954 a Dalí retrospective was held at the Palazzo Pallavicini in
Rome and in 1964 an important retrospective of his work was shown in Tokyo,
Nagoya, and Kyoto. He continued painting, writing, and illustrating during
the 1960s. The Salvador Dalí Museum in Cleveland was inaugurated
in 1971, and the Dalinian Holographic Room opened at M. Knoedler and Co.,
New York, in 1973. In 1980 a major Dalí retrospective was held
at the Musée National dArt Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,
in Paris, and his work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery, London. The
artist died on January 23, 1989, in Figueras.
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