Salvador Dali Set of 2 Art Posters, Gallery Quality Prints, Wall Art Decor, Modern Art, Vintage Art, Wall Art Poster Print - Sizes A2 A3 A4. The most ever paid for a Salvador Dali piece was $21,671,110 for the painting Portrait de Paul Eluard (1929) on February 10th, 2011. This is by no means an outlier, Dali has had several paintings sell for multiple millions of dollars. Where to buy Salvador Dali paintings for sale? See works for sale below. Why buy from Heritage? Salvador Dali was a great admirer of neurologist Freud, and Freudian theories influenced several paintings of Dali. The open drawers can be traced to Freud’s psychoanalytical method and refer to the inner, subconscious within man.
Online sessions are still available. At this weeklong camp, attendees discover new ways to interpret and create art, meet new friends and have fun. This year’s theme will focus on surreal inventions and the ways surrealist art reimagined the world. The Museum offers week-long camps in both face-to-face and online versions.
A Century of Salvador Dalí
The man. The master. The marvel. Salvador Dalí is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. His fiercely technical yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures and visionary explorations in film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression. From his personal life to his professional endeavors, he always took great risks and proved how rich the world can be when you dare to embrace pure, boundless creativity.
Discover the life and legend of Salvador Dalí, and get to know the people, places and events that transformed this Spanish son into a surrealist sensation. The following timeline outlines the chronology of Dalí's life and work.
The Surreal Journey Begins
Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 to parents Salvador Dalí Cusi, a prominent notary, and Felipa Domenech Ferres, a gentle mother who often indulged young Salvador’s eccentric behavior. Felipa was a devout Catholic and the elder Salvador an Atheist, which was a combination that heavily influenced their son’s worldview. Dalí’s artistic talent was obvious from a young age, and both of his parents supported it—though it is known that the relationship with his disciplinarian father was strained. Ultimately, Dalí’s raw creativity and defiant attitude would distance him from his father, but it would also become the cornerstone of his wildly imaginative artistic feats.
Surreal Fact
In 1903, Horatio Jackson made the first automobile trip across America. It took him 64 full days to drive from San Francisco to NYC.
Budding Brilliance
Dalí’s father quickly realized that his son wasn’t fit for public school, so he enrolled 6-year-old Salvador in the Hispano-French School of the Immaculate Conception where he learned French, the primary language he would later use as an artist. Dalí spent his childhood and early adolescence in Catalonia—school years in Figueres and breaks in the coastal village of Cadaques where his family had a summer home. There, he drew and painted the seaside landscape and met his early mentor Ramon Pichot. Cadaques is also where Dalí’s parents built him his first art studio.
Surreal Fact
In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. It took two years to recover Leonardo da Vinci's missing masterpiece.
School Is Out. Surrealism Is In.
Dalí’s tumultuous 1920s life perfectly reflected the decade’s “roaring” nickname. Four years after being accepted to the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid, he was expelled after refusing to be examined in the theory of art and declaring the examiners incompetent to judge him. He experimented with futurism, impressionism and cubism, and during one of his several trips to Paris, movement leader Andre Breton exposed him to the world of Surrealism. In 1925, Dalí had his first solo exhibition in Barcelona, and the decade saw his works showcased throughout the world. After leaving the Academy, Dalí returned to Catalonia where his art became increasingly bizarre and even grotesque.
Surreal Fact
In 1925, a diphtheria outbreak in rural Alaska prompted 18 dog-sled teams to travel 674 miles to bring medicine to those in need. The Iditarod commemorates this trek every year.
Trials, Trouble and Travel
The thirties watched Dalí transform from a key figure in the Surrealist movement into its enemy. After becoming a prominent figure of the group, he was nearly expelled after a “trial” in 1934. His dismissal was due to his apolitical stance, his personal feud with leader Andre Breton, and his public antics. In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started and Dalí and his wife remained in Paris, where he continued evolving his artistic style. He was heavily influenced by the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, whom Dalí met in 1938. In 1939 Andre Breton definitively expelled Dalí from Surrealism.
Surreal Fact
When Betty Boop made her cartoon debut in 1930, her character was actually a dog and not a woman.
Inspiring Awe In America
Dalí and Gala spent the better part of the 1940s in America after fleeing WWII. During the couple’s eight years stateside, New York’s MOMA gallery presented the artist’s first retrospective and he explored new creative expressions on film. He teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock to create dream-like sequences for Spellbound and was later hired by Walt Disney to complete the art and storyboards for what would ultimately become the film Destino. At the very end of the decade and from the comfort of this homeland Catalonia, Dalí entered his noteworthy classical period.
Surreal Fact
Naval engineer Richard James invented the Slinky toy by accident when he was trying to build a ship horsepower monitor using steel tension springs during WWII.
Mystical Measures
Salvador Dalí was in the heart of his classical period throughout the 1950s. He created nineteen large canvases characterized by meticulously detailed images of religious, historical and scientific themes, or what Dalí called “nuclear mysticism.” He became obsessed with geometry, DNA, divinity and experimented heavily with visual illusions. From a personal perspective, his growing affinity for religious themes prompted he and Gala, his muse and the love of his life, to remarry—this time, in a Catholic church.
Surreal Fact
The C.I.A. secretly funded and revised the 1954 animated film version of George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm.
An Icon In Every Dimension
From awe-inspiring works to distinctively high praise, Dalí continued breaking boundaries throughout the sixties. He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, one of Spain’s highest distinctions and began work on what would become the Teatro-Museo Dalí (The Dalí Theatre-Museum) in his hometown of Figueres All the while, Dalí’s deepening interests in space and science were powerfully reflected in his work. He strived to explore and challenge what was possible in the third dimension, and became fascinated with the fourth, or immortality.
Surreal Fact
In 1962, three incarcerated criminals attempted to escape Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on an inflatable raft. It is still unknown whether they were successful or died in the act.
Evolving Perspectives
Even as he aged and his health began to decline, Salvador Dalí remained resilient in his artistic quest to examine life from every possible angle. He continued to paint—endlessly challenging visual norms with holographic and stereoscopic imagery—all the while dedicating much of his time to opening the Teatro-Museo Dalí, which still sits just a few blocks away from his birthplace. Moreover, Dalí remained a prominent public figure and celebrity with retrospectives exhibiting all over the world.
Surreal Fact
Salvador Dali Art Clocks
The world’s first gourmet jelly bean brand (later dubbed Jelly Belly) debuted in 1975 with unusual flavors like licorice, root beer, cream soda and tangerine.
Death Or Immortality?
In the last years of his life, and following the death of his dear wife Gala, Dalí painted less and less. Still fascinated by the ideas of immortality and the fourth dimension, his last works were mathematical in nature—challenging the plasticity of life as we know it. In 1984, Dalí was severely injured in a house fire at his Pubol castle and was confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Friends, followers and fellow artists then moved him back to Figueres to live at the Teatro-Museo where he died of heart failure on January 23, 1989 at the age of 84.
Surreal Fact
In 1985, denture manufacturers stopped using radioactive uranium in their porcelain. The toxic material was added for decades to give false teeth a natural look.
Living On Through Imagination
Even after death, Salvador Dalí’s star didn’t fade. In 1990, his estate was split between Madrid and Catalonia, and many prominent exhibitions of the artist’s work continued to show throughout the world. From Montreal, London and Spain to Tokyo, Venice and the United States, Dalí’s indescribable talent and extraordinary creativity has become a universal language of fearlessness, inspiration and relentless self-expression. The Dalí Museum continues to honor the work and memory of its namesake with an expansive permanent collection, educational programming and world-class exhibits featuring other notable artists, including Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.
Surreal Fact
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned, was born in 1996 and lived for six and a half years.
The Spanish painter Salvador Dali remains one of the most controversial and paradoxical artists of the twentieth century. Over the last few decades, Salvador Dali has gradually come to be seen, alongside the likes of Picasso and Matisse, as a prodigious figure whose life and work occupies a central and unique position in the history of modern art. Dali has also come to be regarded not only as its most well-known exponent but also, to many people, as an individual artist synonymous with Surrealism itself. In addition, Dali was a great artist who was a great self-publicist and showman. The combination was an irresistible formula for success. Born in 1904, most of the works he did revolve around painting, sculpture work, and he worked as a graphic artist and designer as well. During the course of his career, he experienced many different art forms, and experimented with a few styles, allowing him to further his points of expression, and the design pieces which he created during the illustrious and extensive career that he had.
Dali is known to be a famous Surrealist and depicting this theme through his paintings and other art works. Most of his works show a sort of dream sequence which he often draws hallucinatory characters. His major contribution to the Surrealist movement is called the 'Paranoiac-Critical Method' which is a form of mental exercise of accessing the subconscious parts of the mind to have an artistic inspiration. He used this method to realize the dreams and imagination ha have in his mind, changing the real world the way he wanted and not necessarily what it was.
The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad. '
-Salvador Dali
During his career, he focused on cubism, futurism, as well as metaphysical painting work, until in 1929, he joined the group of surrealists, and this art movement which he felt a connection to. His fame and notoriety, and talent in the art world, quickly made him a leading force in the Surrealist movement, and he became one of the representatives of the art movement during the 1930s.
Salvador Dali cultivated exhibitionism and eccentricity in the work he created; not only in his art forms, but also in the way which he presented himself to the general public. In fact, in 1936, at a surrealist exhibition in London, he came to the show dressed in a diving suit, and made claims that it was a source of his creative energy. This timeless showmanship not only helped him through the course of his career, it also helped propel him as one of the leading artists in the Surrealist movement of the time. A well-read student of Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali considered dreams and imagination as central rather than marginal to human thought. He also embraced the surrealist theory of automatism; he transformed this theory, into something that was seen in a more positive light, which he titled critical paranoia. Under the concept, he described how the artist should focus on cultivating a genuine delusion while still remaining aware at the back of their mind, that control and reason will be suspended for a period of time. Nowhere is the identification between the modern individual and the subject matter more evident than in Surrealism, where internal tumult is often envisioned as an external phenomenon, one iconic example of such works is Persistence of Memory, 1931. The fact that many Surrealists were committed to grounding their visions with realistic detail may initially seem as unexpected as the Expressionist Vincent van Gogh's debt to observation, until we remember that the name of the movement refers not to the nonreal but to the surreal.
In 1937, Salvador Dali visited Italy, and during this trip, was able to experience many new art forms and creative pieces. During this trip, his work took a turn, towards a more traditional, and more academic style, in comparison to some of the earlier works he created as a surrealist painter. This change in his art form, along with the political beliefs which Salvador Dali held, caused Breton to expel him from the surrealist art movement. Shortly after, in 1940, he moved to the US, where he remained until 1955, experimenting in this new style and technique, and with new design concepts which he had adopted while in Italy.
While living in the US and working there, Salvador Dali devoted much time, and much of his work, to the public, and self publicity. During this time, many of the pieces he created, revolved around religious themes and many distinct religious images. One such piece was Christ of Saint John of the Cross, which he painted in 1951. He also took an approach on sexual subjects as well, and many images he created were of his wife Gala. In 1955, Salvador Dali left the US, and made his way back to Spain.
Although a majority of the work which Salvador Dali created were paintings, he also created sculpture works, design in jewelry, he worked on illustrations for various books and book series, and he also did a series of work for different theaters, and different shows which were performed in the theaters.
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. ”
-Salvador Dali
Much of what Dali does has its roots in the great traditions of painting, and the artist has always freely acknowledged his debt to the great masters, such as Raphael, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Diego Velazquez. His technique is traditional. His treatment of surfaces recalls Flemish painting of the time of van Eyck, and work of the Dutch little masters of the seventeenth century. He has painted still life resembling that of his great compatriot, Zurbaran. His drawing often has Renaissance qualities. His fantastic compositions have been likened to those of Hieronymus Bosch, and mythological and religious themes that he has used are centuries old. 'Hidden forms' recur constantly in the history of painting, most recently in Redon and the Nabis, Bonnard and Vuillard. Some of Dali's later work, with splashes of paint or the effects of 'shots' and 'explosions', reminds us of what Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his 'Treatise on Painting' quoting Titian, who said that 'by throwing a sponge full of color at a wall it leaves a stain in which a fine landscape can be seen... as well as heads of men, animals, battles, rocks, seas, clouds and other things...In this you will find marvelous ideas because the mind of the painter is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things.'
Just like William Shakespeare on literature, and Isaac Newton on Physics, Dali's impact on surrealism is tremendous. There is no denying that Salvador Dali is one of the most famous, and much-appreciated artists of the 20th century; but, there is also much conflict that revolves around him, and the work he did. Many who are critics of the artist, claim that following the short stint that he had as a surrealist, he did very little, if any work that contributed to the art world, and to his career in general. On the flip side, there are others who appreciate his work, and visions. In fact, there is more than one museum that has been opened, which celebrates the artist, and which showcases quite a few of the pieces that Salvador Dali contributed to the art world, during the course of his career.
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. ”
-Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali Artworks
Although actively engaged throughout his life in a serious dialogue with the history of world art which ranged from Renaissance Art masters Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci to Cubism Pablo Picasso and Dadaism Max Ernst - Dali's aspirations always remained courageously and even chauvinistically of this continent. In the future, when Dali's paintings have fallen into the proper perspective with the work of artists of all periods, much that seems significant to us today may lose its interest. However, Dali will always stand out as one of the very few twentieth-century painters who combines profound respect for the traditions of the past with intensely modern feelings. People will always look at his work because of his extremely personal and always surprising imagination, for that is where his genius lies.