Baterbys Art Auction Gallery - Bios

Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 in a town called Figueres in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí attended drawing school and discovered modern painting in 1916. His first public exhibition was not until 1919 in the Municipal Theater in Figueres. In 1922 Dalí moved to Madrid to study at the Academia de San Fernando. His ego grew and he was expelled from the Academia in 1926 because he claimed that none of the professors were competent enough to examine him. In 1931, Dalí created one of his most well-known works: The Persistence of Memory. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches reject the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic, and this sense is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape and the ants and flies devouring the other watches.

Dalí married his muse and inspiration Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova who was eleven years his elder in 1934. In 1940, at the beginning of World War II in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States where Dalí decided to return to Catholicism. When Dalí returned to Catalonia in 1949, he experimented with many strange medias and processes. He made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions, science and religion. In 1980, Dalí’s health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife Gala was dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of non-prescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic ability. On January 23, 1989 he died of heart failure in his hometown Figueres.