100th Anniversary of Salvador Dali's Birth

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech devoted himself to drawing and painting at a very young age. He was born in 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which are located sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. He discovered modern paintings during the summer of 1916. Soon after, he studied at the Municipal School of Drawing in Figueres, followed by studies at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain. In 1925, he received the earliest recognition of his talent as an artist with his first one-man show in Barcelona. In the following year, Dalí went to Paris where he had another one-man show and joined the Paris Surrealist group of painters and sculptors. By 1929, Dalí was considered the leader of the Surrealist movement.

During the 1930s, Dalí's paintings were being shown in international surrealist exhibitions. By the end of 1930, Dalí began to explore styles outside of Surrealism. In 1940, Dalí and his wife, Gala, left Europe to flee World War II and moved to the United States. During this period, he had the first major retrospective exhibit of his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1941), followed by the publication of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

Dalí continued to move away from Surrealism and into a primarily new style, which became know as his "classic" period. This period, influenced by a visit to Italy, consisted of a series of images with scientific, historical, or religious themes. Dalí remained in the United States until 1955, and then returned to Spain, where he lived the rest of his life.

Dalí explored other creative areas during the latter part of his life. During the 1970s, he created and inaugurated the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, which housed a large collection of his works ranging from his earliest creations to the works he produced in the last years of his life. In 1983, he created the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation to manage, protect, and promote his artistic and intellectual legacy.

Salvador Dalí was a 20th-century artist whose paintings of melting clocks and desolate landscapes changed the course of art. One of the best-known of the artists and poets who called themselves Surrealists, Dalí painted in a style of hyper-realism that made the world hauntingly vivid. In his paintings, he created a dream world full of hidden images and ambiguous dramas. Dalí was best-known as a painter, but he was also a writer, poet, theater designer, filmmaker, and theorist.

Today, the largest comprehensive collections of Salvador Dalí's original artwork can be found at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg and Dalí's own museum in his hometown Figueres, Spain.