Salvador Dali exhibited many signs of marginality throughout his early years. Once Dali decided to become a painter, he concentrated fully on the intricicacies involved in the art. Dali was also a very temperamental and difficult child, who expected and received the fulfillment of his whims by his parents. When he attended school in Figuras starting at the age of nine, Dali became a class daydreamer. He also dressed differently from the others, preferring to wear a dark blue jacket which buttoned at the neck, a loose bow tie, and baggy trousers. Dali complemented this ensemble by maintaining long hair and sideburns, and by carrying about a cane.

Salvador Dali began his painting career at the age of eight. His parents allowed him to continue his artistic interests because of the influence of the Pichot family, a family full of artists who lived at the Mill-Tower, their family home. Ramon Pichot provided Dali with his first contact to Impressionism. During this early period Dali primarily created still lifes, figure drawings, and landscapes of Cadaques. Dali was also influenced by Juan Nunez, a teacher at a night school for drawing which he was allowed to attend. Nunez introduced Dali to watercolors and etchings. Dali was influenced by Impressionism until 1919. From 1920 to 1921 Impressionism gave way to Pointillism and the use of color. During this time Dali was heavily influenced by the works of both Fauves and Bonnard. His paintings attempted to capture the feeling of the atmosphere by lighting only the object in mention. Dali also began using different styles and mastered many techniques. For a brief period in 1920, after the death of Dali's mother, his works became gray and muted, full of sadness. Both these early paintings and those that follow all have strong links to Dali's Catalonian ancestry. Dali strongly loved the area of his youth, and most of his works reflect his sentiments.

In 1920 Salvador Dali was sent to the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid so that he could receive a diploma as professor of drawing. Dali soon came under the influence of such people and movements as Juan Gris, Seurat, Carlo Carra, the Italian Metaphysical School, and Picasso's Cubism. Dali began experimenting with Cubist painting using only the colors black, white, sienna red, and olive green. Salvador Dali also associated with other students in the Residence, a dormitory, forming a friendship with Garcia Lorca, among others. In 1923 Dali was suspended from the Academy for a year because he was suspected to have started a riot against the Academy board's choice for a professorship. Dali was further arrested and imprisoned in 1923 in Gerona because of political reasons. The government thought he was allies with the Catalonian separatist movement, yet Dali had always been apolitical throughout his entire life. Dali returned to the San Fernando Academy in 1925, but he was permanently expelled in 1926.

The Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona first exhibited Dali's paintings in a one-man show on Nov. 14-27, 1925. Such works portrayed include the Portrait of the Artist's Father and Girl Standing at the Window. The Dalmau Gallery held another exhibit in 1926, portraying The Rocks of Llaner, Figure on the Rocks-Penya Segats, Venus and Cupids, and The Basket of Bread, the first of Salvador Dali's paintings to be shown in America. It was exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928 (Descharnes, 19). Dali was now improving techniques already mastered, such as Impressionism, Pointillism, Futurism, Cubism, and Neo-Cubism. Dali's paintings became associated with three categories during 1927-1929. They either depict a measure of man's universe and his sensations, the use of matter as totalitarian hierarchy through the use of collage and the creation of objects charged with sexual symbolism, and the creation of ideographic canvases (Descharnes, 22). Dali's introduction to the Surrealist Movement occurred in 1928, when he and Joan Miro visited Paris and became friends with Paul Eluard and Rene Magritte.

Salvador Dali's first Surrealist period began in 1929. The paintings from this time were usually small oils with the use of collage painted on panels of olive wood. Dali's painting became "trompe l'oeil photographs" of his dream images. "Photography in three dimensions and in color of the superfine images of concrete irrationality entirely made by hand" (Descharnes, 24). The use of dream images always dominated Dali's art. Before even entering the Surrealist Movement, Dali was an avid reader of psychoanalytic theory and the works of Freud. Dali's major contribution to the Surrealist Movement came to be known as the paranoiac-critical method. This method attempted to systemize confusion and to use irrational material from the oneiric and subconscious, along with mysticism (Descharnes, 11). Another definition stated that the paranoiac-critical method was the "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena" (Descharnes, 32). Salvador Dali's obsessive themes used from 1930 to 1934 concentrated on William Tell, Lenin, Millet's Angelus, and Hitler. Dali also experimented with double imagery in 1935.

Although Dali's works have been analyzed by art critics, and have been associated with particular meanings, Dali himself stated that it was normal if people didn't understand his paintings. He wrote, "How do you expect my enemies, my friends, and the public in general to understand the meaning of the images that appear suddenly and which I reproduce in my pictures, when I myself, who am the one who 'makes' them, I don't understand them either?" (Gerard, 3).Dali's works during the Surrealist period portrayed absolute realism in order to emphasize the proper character of the objects. After the objects were emotionally autonomous, he connected them together by combining them in a landscape in which neither of the objects belonged. There were two different perspectives in his paintings, also. The first perspective focused on previous works and their arithmetical and geometric aspects. The second perspective focused on Dali's impressions of locations near to his heart, such as the plain of Ampurdan and Cadaques. All of Dali's imagery contained the basic element of detail, and all of Dali's landscapes were painted from childhood memories.

Dali soon became notorious within the Surrealist Movement. He obtained his first patrons, the Viscount and Viscountes Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, in 1929. Dali became associated with Breton, Eluard, Aragon, and Tzara, leaders of the movement, and was often visiting its headquarters at the Place Blache on the terrace of the Cafe Cyrano. 1933 saw the first exhibition of Dali's works in New York. Salvador Dali was expelled from the Surrealist Movement in 1934, however. Dali had concentrated obsessively on the image of Hitler, earning the movement a questionable reputation with local government. Dali's expulsion did not end his Surrealist painting, however. The Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited forty-three of Dali's paintings and seventeen of his drawings in November of 1941. Since then, three other major retrospective exhibitions have been shown: one at the Olympic Games of 1964 in Japan, one in the New York Gallery of Modern Art from 1965-1966, and one in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1970. Money became tangible proof of Salvador Dali's success, leading him to a fascination with gold.

Salvador Dali met Helena Dimitriovnie Diakonova, commonly known as Gala, in 1929. She was then the wife of Paul Eluard, the leader of the Surrealist Movement. In Gala, Dali believed that he had found the perfect figure. She had a childlike face and arms, yet she was definitely an erotically beautiful woman. Gala returned Dali's affections, leaving Eluard and joining Dali in his adventures for the next forty years. The two seem to have loved each other passionately. Gala was the realistic of the couple. She took care of many of Dali's legal and financial matters, such as contracts with dealers. Dali was ever thankful for Gala's ability to keep their life organized. Dali and Gala bought a fisherman's barracks near the Port Lligat in Catalonia, two kilometers from Cadaques, where they would stay from spring to autumn for the rest of their lives. During the winter they would travel to either Paris or New York. Dali and Gala did not have any children. They shared a wonderful relationship together, each respecting and adoring the other for over forty years, until Gala died in 1982 (http://wildsau.) The only family problems that occurred in Dali's life happened in 1929, when an action by Dali enraged his father and caused the subsequent banishment of Dali from the family. Dali had written on a Sulpicien chromo that 'Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother's portrait.' This statement was misunderstood by many, including Dali's father, who understood it to be an insult to his dead wife and the family name.

Salvador Dali eventually became transformed from psychoanalysis to interests in nuclear physics. His new interests ranged from Bikini and modern physics, cybernetics, space adventure, hibernation, DNA and the nucleic acids, genetic memory, they dynamics of the logarithmic spiral which mathematically regenerates itself, and Gabor's holography. Dali also concentrated more on religious works. He even combined aesthetics and science by imagining that all protons and neutrons are angelic elements. Works from this period include the physical works of Atomica Melancholica and The Three Sphinxes of Bikini and the religious work of The Madonna of Port Lligat.

Salvador Dali was not just a painter. As Salvador Dali himself wrote, "My work is but a reflection, one of the innumerable reflections of what I accomplish, write, and think. All my painting is only a small fragment of my total cosmogony" (Gerard, 16). He was also a writer, a jeweler, a furniture designer, and a film producer. In 1928 Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel wrote together the scenario for the Surrealist movie Un Chien Andalou. They attempted to co-author another Surrealist movie, L'Age d'or, but they disagreed on the subject matter. Bunuel finished writing the movie, yet it was banned from the theaters because it incited a brawl between the Royalists and the Surrealists. Salvador Dali created sculptures with the help of Alberto Giacometti, and he was an avid writer. Just a few of his books include La Femme Visible (1930), L'Amour et la memoire (1931), and Conquest of the Irrational (1935). Dali wrote a manifesto, Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness (1939), an autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), a novel, Hidden Faces (1944-1948), and a treatise on the technique of painting, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (1944-1948). In the 1930's Dali contributed to magazines such as Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution and Minotaure. During WWII, Dali lived in America and collaborated with magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Town and Country. Salvador Dali also designed the costumes and scenery of several ballets.

Salvador Dali was an incredibly gifted man. In many ways, Salvador Dali excelled in or utilized all of the seven intelligences. He was gifted visually with his paintings. His writings showed verbal intelligence, and his work in ballet and movie production involved both body/kinesthetics and musical intelligences. Dali's interest in new scientific discoveries heightened his logical/mathematical intelligence, because he not only needed to understand the discovery, but how he interpreted its implications. Dali improved his intra personal intelligence while using psychoanalysis and the interpretation of his dreams, and he was highly interpersonally intelligent due to his charismatic, eccentric character. He knew how to put people at ease, and how to relate to them through his works.

Salvador Dali was an exceptional painter. He seemed to have led a charmed life, being gifted with so many talents and a very loving wife. For the most part, Dali did not have much cause to be unhappy with his life. Salvador Dali summed up the mood of his life when he wrote, "Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonder struck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali" (Descharnes, 9).

Gerard, Max. Dali. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1968.

http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/~chris/Dali/