Salvador Dalí

Who was Salvador Dalí?

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, in the Catalonia region of Spain.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

Famous Quotes:

• Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
• Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
• Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
• Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
• The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
• It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
• What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust.
• The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
• We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.