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Salvador Dali

© Nick Burton

Salvador Dali was born on May 2, 1904 in Figureas, Spain. He supposedly executed his first painting in 1910 at the age of six, and cultivated a love of Impressionism by the age of 12. By early 1918, he was exhibiting his work at a theater in Figueras, where his work was praised by art critics. He then moved to Madrid to study at the Madrid Academy of Art and moved into Madrid's Resedencia deEstudiantes, a residence for students from well-to-do families. He flirted with cubism at the Academy,and quickly became part of Madrid's avant garde, making fast friends with poet Garcia Lorca and film maker Luis Bunuel. When he helped protest the appointment of a mediocre artist as a professor, he was expelled from the Academy.

He returned to the Academy in 1925 , only to be sent down again, but by that time, Dali felt he had very little to learn from the lectures there that bored and disappointed him greatly. The Catalonian landscapes and family portraits he had gave way to work that expressed the images of the unconscious. He held exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona, and in 1927, collaborated with fellow Resedencia student and Surrealist Luis Bunuel on a film that would become infamous - Un Chien Andalou, a short film that brilliantly showcased Dali and Bunuel's gift for surreal and disturbing imagery (the film opens with the eye ball being sliced open with a razor , one of the most famous images in cinema). During the filming, Dali became accepted by Andre Breton and the Paris Surrealists, and met the great Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, whose wife, Gala, Dali seduced and soon made his wife. But in 1934, Dali submitted his canvas "The Old Age Of William Tell" to the Salon des Independents, and the work enraged Surrealist leader Breton, who objected to the work's depiction of William Tell as Lenin.

In the '30s Dali began appearing almost more as a celebrity known for his flamboyance. In 1936 during a Surrealist exhibit in London, he gave a lecture in a diving suit (in which he almost suffocated) and appeared on the cover of Time magazine the same year. He soon broke completely with Breton and the Surrealists when it became apparent that the prime motivation for Dali's art was money (Breton's nick name for Dali became the anagram Avida Dollars). It was, however, during the '30s when Dali made perhaps his best canvases. His 1931 canvas "The Persistence of Memory" featured his now-famous soft watches, and other works from this time featured the images of the irrational that would become his trademarks - ants, bread, crutches, barren landscapes with strange bio-morphic forms ("Sleep," ""Premonition Of Civil War"), and tributes to Jean-Francois Millet's "The Angelus."