My Life

Hola!

My name is Salvador Dali and I was born in a prosperous family in Figueres, Espana on the morning of May 11, 1904. My parents were very good to me and supportive of my artistic aspirations. They built my first studio in our hometown, but later I attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. People thought I was brilliant, which led to my first one-man show in Paris when I was only twenty-one years old. However, that was not the end of my success, when I teamed up with a bunch of other people, called the surrealists. They called me the “high priest of Surrealism” which was a style that showed reality beyond material objects of this world. In other words, we surrealists like to melt our models, or maybe it was just me because the people that called me their “leader” kicked me out of their surrealist group. It was okay though because I guess that didn’t stop me from continuing to exhibit my works internationally. I couldn’t deal with a lot of the things going on in Europe at the time, so I ran away to the United States to study other subjects concerning religion and science. I know, crazy right? Salvador Dali, the epitome of surrealism, studying science of all subjects? Well, it gave me nineteen more paintings that were exhibited in the National Gallery in Washington D.C.  Anyway, in the midst of all the madness and busy-ness of my life, I met the love of my life, Gala. She was a Russian immigrant and a lot older than I was. However, she was a married woman when I met her, but even though she was married, that didn’t stop her from staying with me and finally had a legal divorce with her husband. She was my lover, companion, model, and business manager. She was probably the most stable thing in my life and managed my success during my exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Sadly, after her former husband’s death, we saw less of each other, but she still supported me and I know she still loved me. After she died, I opened my own museum, called the Teatro Museum, in my hometown, at age seventy-four. I kept to myself a lot more after that, as my health was gradually failing and fading away. I died of heart failure in 1989, two years after someone attempted to burn down my house.  I lived my life not thinking about what anyone else said about my works, I just did what I wanted. You can see my life and what I experienced through my paintings and see what kind of world I lived in. The legacy my paintings may have left can be judged as terrifying or disturbing, but it was a way that I could make what everyone else believed to be irrational; tangible. Obviously, sticking with the rational style of medieval times was terribly obsolete, so why not portray a world of fantasy, dreams, and nightmares?

Sources:
Spielvogel
http://thedali.org/history/biography.html
http://www.artelino.com/articles/salvador_dali.asp