January 23, 1989: Salvador Dalí, the exponent artist of surrealism, dies

January 23, 1989 by El Orden Mundial@elordenmundialThe Spanish artist Salvador Dalí passed away at the age of 84. His prolific career and his striking personality made him one of the reference surrealists, with works such as 'The persistence of memory' and collaborations with filmmakers such as Buñuel, Disney or Hitchcock.WhatsAppTwitterFacebookLinkedInTelegramMenéame

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Salvador Dalí i Doménech was born in Figueras, Catalonia, in 1904. From a middle-class family, he soon became interested in art and learned to paint with local artists such as the Impressionist Ramón Pichot. During his high school studies he published articles on art in the student magazine Studium and in 1922 he moved to Madrid to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He lived in the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he met future figures of art and literature such as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico García Lorca.

In the capital he began to experiment with the avant-garde and to develop the quirky and rebellious personality that, along with his pointy mustache, characterized him throughout his life. Although he made successful exhibitions, he did not complete his studies, as he was expelled from the Academy in 1926 for refusing to take the final exams on the grounds that there was no one good enough to examine him. This, however, did not prevent him from becoming a prolific and world-renowned artist.

Painting, sculpture, jewelry and cinema

Thanks to Buñuel and his trips to Paris, Dalí became interested in surrealism, the avant-garde of which he would become a benchmark. Inspired by the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the surrealists sought to access the subconscious and portray what happens in it freely, regardless of whether it was disturbing or meaningless. Dalí developed his own technique to achieve this, the paranoiac-critical method, which consisted of using real images and projecting the subconscious onto them, imitating a paranoid state. However, his style also drank from classical authors such as Velázquez, whom he admired, as well as contemporaries such as Picasso.

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In his surrealist paintings he captures dreamlike landscapes, with recurring elements such as elephants, insects or his wife and his muse, Gala. His most famous work is The Persistence of Memory (1931), which represents a landscape with melting clocks, but they are also known The Great Masturbator (1929), Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before of awakening (1944) or The Temptation of San Antonio (1946), with its characteristic long-legged animals.

Dalí also made sculptures and designed jewelry, shop windows and theater sets, illustrated books and participated in television commercials. Also, he left his mark on the cinema. First in the films An Andalusian Dog (1929) and The Golden Age (1930), by Buñuel, and during his stays in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, painting the sets for Alfred Hitchcock's Remember (1945) and collaborating with Walt Disney in the short film Destino. This project would not see the light of day until 2003, when a Disney nephew found it archived and decided to finish it and release it. Dalí also began a collaboration with the Marx Brothers in 1937, which did not prosper.

“I am surrealism!” and other scandals of Salvador Dalí

For some, Dalí's extravagant behavior was part of his work, although it also earned him rejection from critics and colleagues. Some of his actions were classified as happenings, that is, acts or shows performed in a daily context that seek interaction between the artist and his audience. He did many of them in the 1960s, such as walking his anteater through the streets of Paris, giving a press conference on the back of a stuffed horse or signing books accompanied by a belly-up turtle. That use of his public image allowed him to make himself known.

However, his main controversies revolved around his ideological ambiguity. In 1934, his rejection of the left-wing postulates of the Surrealist Movement, which for him should be apolitical, and the commodification of his art caused him to be subjected to a surrealist trial and expelled from the Movement. His response would become famous: "I am surrealism!" The founder of the Movement, the French poet André Breton, dedicated the Avida Dollars anagram to him with his name and accused him of defending Hitler, whom Dalí saw as a fascinating character.

This opportunistic image was seen once again when he returned to Spain in 1948, when he did not hesitate to praise the Francisco Franco regime for being able to work in the country, which annoyed other exiled artists and intellectuals. Years later he would continue praising the dictator. All in all, Dalí left an important legacy that inspired artists such as Ángel Planells or Nikolas de Lekuona. Among his recognitions is the Marquisate of Dalí i Púbol, which King Juan Carlos I granted him in 1982. After his death on January 23, 1989, due to cardiac arrest, Salvador Dalí bequeathed a large part of his work to the State Spanish, which was shared between its Theatre-Museum in Figueras and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.

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