The Early Years
(1904 - 1929)
When Salvador Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueras, Spain, he was actually the third Salvador Dalí. His father was named Salvador, and he had an older brother, who had died 9 months before Dalí's own birth. Because of the incredibly coincidental dates between the death of the first child and the birth of the second, Salvador Dalí's parents chose to look at the second son as a reincarnation of the first, and as such, treated him accordingly. OUR Salvador Dalí was actually told that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, and Dalí himself admits that the ghostly memory of this lost sibling was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He was taken to the grave of the older brother, and given free reign over the Dalí household. One of the young boy Dalí's favorite pastimes was parading about in a blue sailor suit or preferably, an emperor's costume. The royal treatment accorded to him by his parents was the result of their fears surrounding the death of their first son. The golden treatment and always present shadow of his elder brother caused in him a distinct shift in personality.
It is this treatment as a young child that relates directly to Dalí's formation of a very unique and conspicuous personality. He says in several of his writings that the dualistic stresses imposed upon him, that of living both as himself, and his dead brother, caused in him a particular obsession with decay and putrefaction. This is where many of his disturbing images of things like decaying corpses, insects, and other disturbing images began forming. In addition, Dalí was often teased by the local schoolchildren, who often threw insects, especially grasshoppers at him. The grasshopper became a distinct symbol of revulsion and horror for Dalí, especially during his Surrealist period. Thus it can be said that the events of Dalí's first 7 or so years of life profoundly influenced his psyche and thus his destiny. This is very much in accordance with the Freudian principles of psychoanalysis, which point to young childhood as a critical development stage, especially with regards to the parents.
The Dalí's were not about to have another burial. Dalí was often tended by his childhood nurse Lucia, who pops up in many of his Surrealist paintings, but he was seldom truly ill. One of the best examples of Lucia appearing in a later work is The Weaning of Furniture, Nutrition which was completed in 1934, which makes it a Surrealist painting.
Another child was born to the Dalí Family in 1908. Anna Maria Dalí, the baby of the family, came to be one of Dalí's most close childhood attachments, and also served as a model for many of Dalí's academic works later in life. Although there was the typical young sibling rivalry, Dalí's antics still allowed him to reign as the young dictator in the family.
The scholar Dalí was not an overwhelmingly brilliant academician. However, this author is convinced that Dalí was aware of his own genius at a young age. He began painting in earnest at about the age of 10, although his more notable works begin at age 13. During this period, Dalí would often visit the Pichot family, who lived just outside Figueras. The Pichot were very artistic in their own right; in fact, many of Salvador Dalí's earliest influences can be tracked directly to the Pichot. Ramon was a painter, while Ricard was a cellist who became the subject for one of Dalí's early Impressionist works. The Pichot encouraged Dalí's early interest in art, and soon his father set him up his own small studio complete with easel and other needed equipment. One later work by Dalí, Three Young Surrealist Women... has specific details that refer back to Dalí's love of the Pichot family. This particular Surrealist work is covered in another section in greater detail.
Most of the works done by Dalí as a young teenager were of the landscape surrounding Cadaqués and Figueras.
Another important aspect of the landscape in and around Dalí's home were the ruins near Ampurius. These more than millennia old Roman garrison ruins were the playground for Dalí's imagination. This sense of continuity with an ancient heritage is probably at least partially responsible for Dalí's love of his Catalan heritage.
This deep rooted love for his heritage is seen over and over again throughout Dalí's works, thus making this area of study an important one in understanding the man behind the myth.Yet another facet of Dalí's life at this point was the beginning of his formal art training, at the hands of Juan Nunez. Studying under Nunez at the Municipal Drawing School, Dalí absorbed the basics of draughtsmanship, painting and engraving. In 1917, Dalí's father arranged a small exhibition of his son's charcoal drawings at their home. It was to be the first of many occasions in which people would marvel at the wonder of Salvador Dalí's abilities.
At the time that Salvador Dalí's mother died in 1921, Dalí thought of himself mainly as a Impressionist painter, influenced especially by Ramon Pichot's own landscapes and seascapes of the time. Although Dalí's father remarried his late wife's sister soon thereafter, this was a turbulent time for Dalí, as he struggled to form his own adult identity away from that of his family, and especially is father. Soon thereafter, in 1922, Dalí was accepted at the Special School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving, also known as the Academia de San Fernando, in Madrid.
Once he passed the entrance exams, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes ( the student dormitories) where he was destined to meet with other great young minds of his time. At the age of 18, Dalí had become a part of the young elite, an emerging group of intellectuals that would have a profound effect on Dalí. The most important of his associates at this time were Luis Bunuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Both of these individuals, as we shall see, were important to Dalí's continued intellectual development.
It was in about 1923 that Dalí first started to experiment with cubism, often locked away in the seclusion of his own room. It is speculated that his first contact with cubism came from a futurist catalog that had been brought to him by the patriarch of the Pichot family, Pepito. Most of his colleagues were still experimenting with Impressionism, which, as we have seen, Dalí had mastered some years before. When his peers discovered him secretly at work on the Cubist paintings, he instantly became somewhat of a campus personality, vaulting from standard membership to a leader of an avant garde group of young Spanish intellectuals. Here is an interesting image, Dalí's Picture ID from the San Fernando Academy which shows what he looked like at about this time.
In 1926 Dalí was expelled from the San Fernando Academy, because of his refusal to take his final oral exams. When told that the final exam topic would be about Raphael, Dalí exclaimed that he knew much more about the subject than did his examiners, and thus he refused to take the test. His expulsion adds an interesting twist to his story in that the most influential Surrealist painter of our time never actually obtained a formal art degree.
Over the next few years, Dalí traveled extensively, visiting Paris in 1928. Dalí actually met with Picasso in his own studio, and event which profoundly influenced him. During the year 1928, Dalí also experimented heavily with the artistic materials he had available to him. Several paintings include both sand and pebbles from Dalí's beloved beaches glued directly to the canvases. Dalí's interest in the surreal, and the bizarre was about to blossom as he entered the next phase of his lifetime.
It was also in 1928 that Dalí first obtained true international exposure, when his oil painting Basket of Bread was shown at the Carnegie International Exposition in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. This photo realistic work is a fine example of Dalí's mastery over yet another artistic style. Painting in the beautiful and so real style of the Dutch masters, works like the paintings of Jan Vermeer heavily influenced Dalí as he was maturing.
As Dalí turned the corner into the year 1929, two very important events were about to take place in his life. Both would forever alter the destiny of Salvador Dalí, who was determined to become one of the greatest painters of all time. He had always been aware of his own greatness, and now was standing at the door of a new era. An era in which HE would come to reign supreme, and be elevated to the status of a Master, the very standard against which great works of art are to be judged.
