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.