Salvador Dalí was a Spanish artist whose iconic Surrealist paintings and drawings made him one of the best-known artists of the 20th century.
Dalí was born in the Catalan town of Figueres, Spain, in 1904, and became obsessed with art from a young age. The second of three children, Dalí’s older brother, also named Salvador, died of gastroenteritis as a toddler nine months before Dalí’s birth. Though Dalí never knew his elder brother and namesake, the death would trouble him throughout his life, becoming a recurring preoccupation in his work, such as in his 1963 painting “Portrait of My Dead Brother.” Dalí’s mother also died of cancer when he was only 16. Years later, he recounted that her death “was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.”
Dalí’s art was inspired by a number of artistic styles, including the works of Picasso, before developing the Surrealist style he became known for. During his 20s, he’d gained an international following and had created his most famous painting, “The Persistence of Memory”, in 1931 at age 27. He went on to produce thousands of works over the course of his career, some of the most mind-bending art the world has ever seen, including “Swans Reflecting Elephants” (1937), “The Elephants” (1948), and “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” (1955).
Dalí’s art was not only notable for its surrealism, but also its sexual obsessiveness and homoeroticism. Dalí, a deeply eccentric man with a litany of sexual hangups, was plagued by fears of impotence and apprehensions about the sexual act itself that routinely made their way into his art. In pieces such as “The Great Masturbator” (1929), “The Enigma of Hitler” (1939), and his various depictions of Saint Sebastian, Dalí expressed his sexual anxieties as well as his bi-curious fascination with the male form.
In 1923, Dalí struck up a deep friendship with the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca when the two were both students. They became inseparable, forming an intimate relationship that many believe went beyond the platonic. The two exchanged letters of an erotic and longing nature, such as a 1928 missive in which Dalí wrote:
You are a Christian storm and you are in need of some of my paganism […] I will go get you and give you some seaside medicine. It will be winter and we will light a fire. The poor beasts will be trembling with the cold. You will recall that you are an inventor of marvelous things and we will live together with a portrait machine…
Victor Fernández, the journalist who gathered this correspondence between Dalí and Lorca, wrote that behind these letters is a shadow of homosexual impulse, “a game of seduction: Lorca is giving the best of himself, using his words to try to win over Dalí.”
Dalí publicly insisted that he rejected the poet’s sexual advances and was not “homosexual”, though the two generally remained close until Lorca’s death at the hands of nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which left Dalí distraught. Given the era in which he lived, and the many sexual neuroses he was known to have had, many scholars speculate that Dalí’s art and relationship with Lorca point to a queerness Dalí may have been unable or unwilling to openly embrace.
In 1929, Dalí met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, known simply as Gala, a Russian-born woman married to the poet Paul Éluard. Gala soon divorced Éluard and began living together with Dalí. The two were married in 1934, and remained so until Gala’s death in 1982. The couple lived between Paris and Catalonia during the 1930s and fled to the United States in 1940, eventually moving back to Dalí’s native Spain after the war.
Dalí’s work and achievements received some of the highest honors that could be bestowed on an artist, including the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1964, his admittance as an associate member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 1972 and as an associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France in 1978, being made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III in 1982, as well as the 1st Marquess of Dalí de Púbol by King Juan Carlos in 1982.
After years of declining health, Dalí died in 1989 at the age of 84.