Catalonia, the region in north-eastern Spain where Salvador Dalí spent his formative childhood and adolescent years, is a land of both exquisite beauty and harsh austerity. The seemingly bizarre and fantastical rock formations and sweeping landscape vistas that frame so many of Dalí’s classic and celebrated Surrealist paintings are, in fact, faithful representations of the rugged and breathtaking terribilità of the local Catalan landscapes that inspired and nourished the artist throughout his life – the majestic Empordà Plain and the rocks and waves at Cadaqués, Portlligat and the Cap de Creus. Over centuries, this arid coastline etched with little creeks has been pummelled by violent storms that lash the sea against the rocks, carving out geological structures suggestive of animals or human forms.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and the Land Education Resource.

Dalí was a man of many contradictions –his insatiable desire for fame and notoriety led him to indulge in self-promoting activities such as delivering a lecture in a diving suit or contorting his distinctive moustache into strange positions. These kind of grandiose and eccentric behaviours sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork, annoying both those who loved his art and his critics. On the other hand, his public persona concealed a deeply serious and highly educated man whose acute intellect could grasp new and challenging ideas, particularly the complexities of modern scientific and mathematical discoveries. The diverse and constantly evolving oeuvre of Dalí, that included oils, watercolours, drawings, graphics, sculpture and jewels, is testimony to his incomparable insight and imagination. There are few who would argue with his early prediction, at the age of sixteen, that ‘I will be a genius, and the world will admire me. I may be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius, because I am sure of it.’

For more detailed information please download the Dali the Man Education Resource.

Salvador Dalí’s first experience of love was firmly rooted in the strong emotional family relationships of his youth, immortalised in penetrating, keenly observed, ‘psychological’ early portraits of his father and sister. In 1929, feeling increasingly controlled by his domineering, protective father, and uncertain of his future, Dalí first encountered Gala, a charismatic Russian emigrant who had already captivated and inspired many of the Surrealists, and who was to become his life-long partner until her death in 1982. She had a decisive influence on Dali’s future career, which she guided to international success, as she took on diverse and multiple roles in their partnership. As model, wife, companion, adviser, muse and business manager, her presence in Dalí’s life was all consuming. Dalí referred to Gala as ‘my intimate truth, my double, my one,’ and frequently signed his works ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’, a reflection of how united they had become as a couple. Gala is celebrated so often throughout Dalí’s paintings and writings that she is a familiar feature of his iconography, often cast in mythological feminine roles such as the Sphinx, Leda and Gradiva.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and Love Education Resource.

Dalí’s interest in science was a life long-affair and in 1935 he described himself as a fish swimming between ‘the cold water of art and the warm water of science’. From a young age Dalí was a voracious reader of science and came to own many books on physics, geometry, optical science, genetics, mathematics and natural history. In practice and in his writings Dalí subscribed to the Renaissance view, that men should acquaint themselves with all aspects of knowledge.

Like the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci before him, Dalí’s interest in even the most theoretical scientific subjects was never abstract, but was driven, rather, by a curiosity about how to apply such principles to his art. In the 1920’s, for example, Freud’s theories about dreams and the human unconscious were published in translation. Dalí used Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis on himself and painted the results with a scientific rigour and precision.

Dalí sought above all clarity in his painting and in his thought, even though he was also a champion of irrationality. His painting never loses its tight, meticulous handling and its focus on detail. It is as though he was striving to achieve a perfection in the logic and handling of his pictures equal to the perfection of a mathematical equation. Dali’s fusion of science and art peaked in the 1970s, in a series of optical illusions that outstrip the realism of photography.

Although Dalí was frightened by many things in his life, science was never one of them. In the 1950s he embraced the first nuclear explosions enthusiastically and without fear, much as he had tackled the sexual theories of Freud three decades earlier. For Dalí, nuclear science, like psychoanalysis, uncovered the underlying structure of things, and made possible a whole new level of precision in their artistic rendition. Dalí met with many leading scientists to discuss how art and science might intersect. Becoming religious in later life, Dalí even hoped that ‘divine mysteries’ might be unlocked through science and then represented on canvas. He died with books of science at his bedside.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and Science Education Resource.

Salvador Dalí’s experience of religion was divided from early on. His mother’s family were devout Catholics, but his father was a staunch atheist who sent him to the local state school to spare his son a Catholic education. The young Dalí shared his father’s aversion. In 1929-1930 his films Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or, made with Luis Bunuel, included scandalous portrayals of the priesthood as corrupt, ignorant and hypocritical. In 1929 Dalí also drew a blasphemous image of Christ and the sacred heart, which he entitled Sometimes I spit with pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother (The Sacred Heart) to the anger and distress of his family.

Although he once blamed Catholicism for his profound sense of guilt about sex, Dalí’s attitude began shifting in America in the 1940s. He came to believe in the possibility of a fusion between modern science, the mystery of religion and the traditions of classicism and began painting his wife Gala as a Renaissance Madonna. In 1949 Dalí attended a private audience with Pope Pius XII. He announced himself a Catholic the next year, or (as he put it) a ‘Catholic without faith’. Dalí spent many of his later years reconciling Catholic dogma with science in ever-larger paintings. Afraid of death, Dalí hoped to avoid it altogether. Failing this he died with last rites in 1989.

For more detailed information please download The Ecumenical
Council Education Resource and the Dali and Religion Education Resource

There is nothing quite like the taste of a freshly opened sea urchin. Sweet, but salty; rich, yet ascetic; unctuous caramel cut through with saline astringency. Soft delicate flesh protected by a threatening spiny carapace. Its visual and sensory contradictions sum up perfectly the paradox of Catalonia. Both Salvador Dalí and his father loved eating sea urchins, freshly caught in the waters of the Mediterranean off the small fishing village of Cadaqués. Beneath the sea urchin’s spiny exterior lies an inner exoskeleton that is a perfectly symmetrical, segmented ovoid. This symmetry fascinated Dalí, who adapted its form to many art works. Food, in fact, runs throughout Dalí’s life and career, and appears in this exhibition in many forms – bread, fish, watermelons, milk, eggs, pomegranates, all have symbolic meanings that are unique to the Dalinian universe.

Following André Breton’s invitation to join the Surrealist movement in 1929, Dalí quickly established himself as the leading Surrealist artist. He spent a great deal of time in Paris over the ensuing decade, where he established friendships with wealthy Parisian patrons and artists. The beginning of Dalí’s Surrealist period marked a growing confidence in his own style. The establishment of the representation of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, which formed the foundation of his aesthetic, and the creation of motifs and symbols which became part of his artistic vocabulary throughout his oeuvre, were consolidated at this time. Ants, crutches, keys, watches, lobsters, bread, eggs and other Dalinian clues were all painted to be interpretable through the lens of Freudian psychology. Dalí’s most striking works combined this dream imagery with echoes of the majestic plains of the Empordà, or the fantastical rock formations found at Cap de Creus, near Cadaqués.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and Surrealism Education Resource.

Dalí’s eclipse in America in the 1950s can be ascribed to two things. His return to Franco’s Spain,away from the glare of the US media, and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, championed by critics who had no time for Surrealism. By now, however, Dalí had financial independence and could afford to focus on the scientific and religious subjects that were increasingly absorbing him. In due course too Abstract Expressionism would come to be supplanted by Pop Art in the 1960s, and its artists, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. Many of their methods, including their impersonal precision, realism, and ironic detachment owe much to Dalí.

Dalí felt vindicated and gratified to come into contact with this new generation of artists, closer to his views. He enjoyed something of a Renaissance in popularity, and acquired an entourage of young admirers in Spain and New York. In his ceaseless quest for ever-greater realism, Dalí embarked on a series of optical illusions in the 1960s through to the 1980s. They included stereoscopic double paintings, designed to be viewed with a lens, and holograms which used the 1971 Nobel prize research of Dennis Gabor to create spectacular three-dimensional imagery. Dalí’s interest during the late phase of his career in spirituality, extra dimensions in art, and new modes of perception, brought him into synch with many of concerns of his time. He believed, however, that the true significance of his projects continued to elude the contemporary generation. ‘My present ideas will be clear some forty years from now’ he declared, to which he added that he did not ‘wish them to be accessible any earlier than that’.

Salvador Dalí developed a lifelong fascination with cinema which flowered initially when he became a pioneer of avant-garde surrealist film, and culminated in his collaborations with Hollywood celebrities and producers. Dalí was equally fascinated by the power of photography to create a fantastical world in which dream and reality merge. He entered into a number of collaborations with notable photographers including Eric Schaal and Philippe Halsman. The advent of television was also eagerly grasped by Dalí who from 1940 onwards saw in this new medium the opportunity to publicise himself to a vast audience. He appeared in numerous advertisements, including a now-famous one for Lanvin Chocolate, and frequently took part in interviews. Dalí’s collaborations with the great cinematic comedian Harpo Marx, with renowned director Alfred Hitchcock, and with Life magazine photographer Philippe Halsman, are considered here.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and the Media Education Resource.

The United States, where he resided from 1940-48, offered Dalí a wealth of opportunities to work with fellow artists and artisans to create a breath-taking array of art works in every conceivable medium – in the process of which Dalí reinvented himself as a true Renaissance man. He published an acclaimed autobiography, an arcane novel, and a Dalinian newspaper; he worked on numerous cinematic projects in Hollywood; he wrote the librettos and designed the costumes and sets for ballets; he entered the advertising industry with gusto; he created astonishing jewels, designed architectural installations, illustrated the literary classics, pushed photography into new realms and embraced the opportunities that television offered for mass communication. Meanwhile his painting entered a new phase, fusing an intense study of the Renaissance old masters with meditations on atomic theory in a post-nuclear world.

Salvador Dalí, whose intuitive sensibility was acutely attuned to new trends and advances in every sphere of life, would have found it impossible as an artist to confine himself to one medium. He was drawn instinctively to the dazzling creative possibilities inherent in modern design. While living in the U.S. in the 1940s, his increasing fame attracted commercial assignments in many fields of design. He enthusiastically applied his ideas to both the high and low ends of the commercial spectrum including advertising, jewellery design, covers for Vogue magazine and other American life-style publications, textile designs for curtains, rugs and neckties for the mass market, and collaborations with Elsa Shiaparelli in haute couture.

For more detailed information please download the Dali and Design Education Resource.

The Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida was founded by Eleanor and Reynolds Morse, passionate Dalí collectors and long friends of the artist. Their lifelong passion for collecting the art of Salvador Dalí saw the Morses eventually acquire some 96 Dalí oils, more than 100 watercolours and drawings, and over 1,300 graphics, sculptures, objets d’art, and photographs during the course of their forty-year friendship with the artist. When the Morses’ collection outgrew their ability to display it comprehensively in their home in Cleveland, Ohio, the couple opened the world’s first Salvador Dalí Museum in Beachwood, Ohio, in 1971. In 1982 the collection moved to Florida, where the Morses inaugurated a much enlarged Salvador Dalí Museum, in St Petersburg, near Tampa. Expanded twice more, in 1989 and 1995, the Salvador Dalí Museum has attracted millions of visitors to St Petersburg.

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain is a private cultural institution that was established in December 1983 at the express wish of Salvador Dalí himself. The Fundació is the custodian of the world’s largest repository of Salvador Dalí artworks and documentation. This comprises some 4,000 works of art in all media – paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings, installations, jewellery, holograms, photography and tens of thousands of archival manuscripts, photographs and documents. The latter are housed in the Centre for Dalinian Studies in Figueres, while a large proportion of the art is on permanent display in the Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.