Paris Art Studies  - Salvador Dalí  1904-1989

 

1904 - Born May 11th at Figueres, Spain son of Felipe Jacinto Dali, a notary and Felipa Domènech. He is named after his brother who died a year earlier at the age of two.

1908 - Birth of Dali’s sister, Ana Maria.

1916 -  Dalí’s father enrolls the young artist in evening classes at the Municipal School of Drawing in Figueres.

1919 - Participates in an exhibition of local artists at the Municipal Theater at Figueres.

1921 - Dalí’s mother dies. His father marries her sister the next year.

1922 - Enters the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid. He meets the future film maker Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

1923 - Dalí is expelled for one year from the San Fernando Academy for criticizing his lecturers and causing dissent amongst the student population.

1925 - First solo exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. Paints Figure at a Window, which is exhibited the following year in a show of the Catalan avant-garde.

1926 - Dalí visits Paris for the first time and meets Pablo Picasso. Dalí is permanently expelled from the San Fernando Academy for subversive behavior.

1929 - Dalí makes the film Un Chien Andalou with his friend Luis Buñuel. The two artists officially join the Surrealist movement. Dalí meets Gala Eluard and they begin their lifelong companionship in Paris. Their relationship causes a rift between Dalí and his father. Paints The Enigma of Desire: My Mother.

1930 - Dalí begins developing and exploring his paranoic-critical method. He purchases a fisherman’s cottage at Port Lligat near Cadaqués, which he inhabits for a part of each year for much of the remainder of his life.

1931 - First solo show in Paris at galerie Pierre Colle.

1932 - Dalí participates in the first Surrealist show in the United States at the Wadsworth Athenaneum in Hartford, Conn. and at the Julien Levy gallery in New York.

1934 - Surrealist leader André Breton criticizes Dalí for not following the principles of the Surrealist movement, and attempts to have him expelled from the group. Dalí and Gala marry in a civil ceremony.

1935 - Paints The Angelus of Gala.

1936 - Paints Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War. The Spanish Civil War begins.

1937 - Dalí creates fabric, clothing and accessory designs for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

1938 - Visits Sigmund Freud in London.

1939 - Dalí completely disassociates from the Surrealist movement. The Spanish Civil War ends.

1940 - Dalí flees with Gala to the United States via Spain after German occupation of France in June. (He visits father in Spain for the first time since their falling-out nearly ten years before). Dalí and Gala remain in the United States until 1948.

1941 - Retrospective exhibition of Dalí and Joan Miró opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Completes writing  The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, a partially fictionalized autobiographical account of his life that is published the following year.

1945 - The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima marks thebeginning of Dalí’s period of “nuclear mysticism.”

Paints My Wife, Naked, Looking at her own Body, which is Transformed into Steps, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture.  Assists Alfred Hitchcock on the set for the movie Spellbound.

1949 - Visits the Pope and presents a version of his painting Madonna of Port Lligat.

1950 - Dalí’s father dies.

1952 - Begins painting The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.

1958 - Dalí and Gala marry in a religious ceremony in Spain.

1963 - Paints Portrait of My Dead Brother.

1964 - First major solo retrospective for Dalí in the Seibu Museum in Tokyo.

1971 - Inauguration of the Dalí Museum in Cleveland, founded by Reynolds Morse, a major Dalí collector. In 1982 the collection is moved to its current location in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

1974 - Inauguration of the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figueres.

1978 - Elected to Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

1980 - Dalí spends much of the year at his home in Port Lligat recovering from an illness.

1982 - Gala dies on June 10th. Dalí has her buried in a crypt at their home at Púbol castle in Spain.

1983 - Paints his last picture, The Swallow’s Tail, from the Series on Catastrophe.

1984 - Dalí is severely burnt in a fire in Púbol castle. He moves to the Torre Galatea, an annex of the Teatre-Museu Dalí, where he resides until his death.

1989 - Dalí dies on January 23rd of heart failure at 85 and is buried in the crypt of the Teatre-Museu Dalí. His will bequeathes his property and remaining works, not previously donated to the Teatre-Museu Dalí, to the Spanish State.