Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain. He started taking art lessons when he was only 10 years old. He attended the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid, but never graduated. He went to Paris in 1928 where he met Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. He experimented with several modern art styles including Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting, which was an Italian style developed around 1917 that tried to capture an "alternative" reality on canvas. Examples of this included big empty landscapes with several odd items. Metaphysical painters tried to make the illogical believable. Very flamboyant and eccentric, Dali described his own work as "hand-painted dream photographs." Time and watches in particular fascinated him, and his best-known picture is probably The Persistence of Memory (often referred to as the painting with the "droopy watches.")

He traveled to Italy in 1937 and in 1934 came to the United States. When World War II broke out, he moved to America permanently, although after the war he continued to travel. He was a prolific and talented man with a wide range of interests. In addition to art, he loved film and worked on several movies including Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller made in 1945. He also did sculpture, book illustrations, jewelry designs, set design for the theatre, and even wrote a novel. He loved to read about science and history. In 1958, he began work on a set of large canvas based on historical events. The most famous one is The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Two museums were dedicated solely to his work in his lifetime, one in St. Petersburg, Florida and the other in his hometown of Figueres, Spain.

Late in life, he developed palsy, which caused shaking and weakness in both hands, and in 1980, he had to stop painting. He was badly injured in a fire in 1984, and in 1986, had to have a pacemaker in his heart. He moved into a tower on top of his museum in Spain where he died on January 23, 1989 of heart failure. Both his artistic and personal style mark him as one of the most unique artists of the 20th century.