I introduce a new category on darkscenario.com, called “Artists”.
In there you will find biographies of various artists, famous or not famous.
For a good start I take a very popular, outstanding artist - Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century. During his lifetime the public got a picture of an excentric paranoid. His personality caused a lot of controversy. After his death in 1989 his name remained in the headlines.

Salvador Dali was born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech on the 11th of May, 1904 in Figures in Catalonia in Spain. His father Salvador Dali i Cusi was a lawyer and a notary. His mother’s name was Felipa Domenech Ferres. She would encourage his artistic talents. His talent as an artist showed at an early age and Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old. His art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School.

Dali had an elder brother who had died 9 months before he was born. It is said that Dali was often told by his parents that he was his own brother, reincarnated. Dali soon came to believe that. Dali also had a younger sister called Ana Maria.

In 1916, he visited Cadaques for a vacation with Ramon Pichot and discovered modern painting. The following year, an exhibition of Dali’s charcoal drawings was arranged by his father in their family home. In 1919, Dali had his first public exhibition in Figueres. Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.

In 1928 Dali went to Paris where he met the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. He established himself as the principal figure of a group of surrealist artists grouped around Andre Breton, who was something like the theoretical “schoolmaster” of surrealism. Years later Breton turned away from Dali accusing him of support of fascism, excessive self-presentation and financial greediness.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recurring images of burning giraffes and melting watches became the artist’s surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to execute his paintings in a nearly photorealistic style. No wonder that the artist was a great admirer of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. In 1929, he also met Gala. She was eleven years older to him and was a Russian immigrant and was already married to the surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Dali and Gala began living together. Dali used to call her his muse.

In 1931, Dali painted ‘The Persistence of Memory’ one of his most well-known and well-liked paintings. In this picture we see the images of several pocket watches melting away and being eaten by ants and flies in a vast landscape of a mountain and a sea. It is said that this painting conveys several ideas within the image; chiefly that time is not rigid, everything is destructible and so on. It is said that the image is also suggestive of Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time.

In 1933 Salvador Dali had his first one-man show in New York. One year later he visited the U.S. for the first time supported by a loan of US$500 from Pablo Picasso. He had a series of spectacular exhibitions, among others a great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Dali became the darling of the American High Society. Celebrities like Jack Warner or Helena Rubinstein gave him commissions for portraits. His art works became a popular trademark and besides painting he pursued other activities - jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel or film making with Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1934 Dali and Gala got married in a civil ceremony.

In 1936 Dali participated in the London International Surrealistic Exhibition where he delivered a lecture titled ‘Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques’. He arrived in a deep sea diving suit, carrying a billiard cue and a pair of Russian wolfhounds. The helmet of the diving suit had to be unscrewed for him to speak. He later said that this was a way that he wanted to show that he was plunging into the depths of the human mind.

In 1936 he made the ‘Lobster Telephone’ for the Scottish patron of the arts, Edward James. The telephone was functional and James bought four of them for use in his home. Dali made close connections with food and sex and used the symbols of the lobster and the telephone to convey that idea.

In 1937, Dali also made the ‘Mae West Lips Sofa’ out of wood and satin. It was inspired from the lips of the actress Mae West, with whom Dali was fascinated. He had previously painted ‘The Face of Mae West’ in 1935.

When Franco came into power after the Spanish civil war, Dali was one of the few people to support his regime. This conflicted with the political views of several of his surrealist friends. This resulted in him being removed from their group. Thereafter, many of his surrealist colleagues would refer to him as if he were dead. This issue along with Dali’s flamboyant eye-catching antics which caught media attention was often severely criticized by the other surrealist painters. Andre Breton coined the anagram ‘Avida Dollars’ (which means ‘eager for dollars’) from the name Salvador Dali. To this Dali had only one answer: ‘Le surrealisme, c’est moi’ which means ‘Surrealism, that’s me’.

When World War II began, Dali moved to the United States. There, he took up the practice of Catholicism. In 1942, he published ‘The Secret Life of Salvador Dali’ which was an autobiography.

In 1944, Dali painted ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening’. This painting along with many others contained the image of an elephant with long, multi-jointed and spindly legs. It is often said the image was representative of phallic overtones and create a sense of a phantom reality and contrast with the idea of weightlessness with structure.

Another image which recurs in several of Dali’s works is the egg. He used it to convey the ideas of prenatal and intrauterine to show love and hope. He also used the image of the snail to show the human head.

In 1948 Dali and Gala returned to Europe, spending most of their time either in their residence in Lligat/Spain or in Paris/France or in New York. Dali developed a lively interest in science, religion and history. He integrated things into his art that he had picked up from popular science magazines. Another source of inspiration were the great classical masters of painting like Raphael, Velasquez or the French painter Ingres. The artist commented his shift in style with the words: “To be a surrealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses.”

In 1958 the artist began his series of large sized history paintings. He painted one monumental painting every year during the summer months in Lligat. The most famous one, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, can be seen at the Dali Museum in St.Petersburg in Florida. It is breath-taking. The artist’s late art works combine more than ever his perfect and meticulous painting technique with his fantastic and limitless imaginations.

Since 1970 the artist had dedicated his energy to transform the former Municipal Theater into a museum and art gallery. In 1974 the Theatro Museo Dali was officially opened.

In 1980 Dali was forced to retire due to palsy, a motor disorder, that caused a permanent trembling and weakness of his hands. He was not able to hold a brush any more. The fact that he could not follow his vocation and passion of painting and the news of Gala’s death in 1982 left him with deep depressions.

After Gala’s death he moved to Pubol, a castle, he had bought and decorated for Gala. In 1984, when he was lying in bed, a fire broke out and he suffered sever burns. Two years later, a pacemaker had to be implanted.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure.

• Kazuhiko ‘Almacan’ Nakamura´s cyberpunk art
• Damien Hirst´s Diamond Skull - Sold
• Museum of Hoaxes Photo Test
• Largest Photo of the world
• Diamond Skull by Damien Hirst