He was born on 11th of May in1904 at 8:45 in the morning in the town of Figueres, Girona, as Salvador, Domingo, Felipe, Dalí Jacinth, son of Salvador Dalí i Cusí, notary, and Felipa Doménech. He was born three years after the death of his first-born brother, caused by a meningitis when he was only seven years old. The given name, Salvador, used to have his dead brother who looked like painter' s twin. „The young patient“ is the title of his first self-portrait, painted at the age of ten years. Shortly after Salvador began his first drawing course with Juan Núñez with whom he learned the use of chiaroscuro.He was admitted at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid) in 1921, from where he was expelled, accused of subversion anarchist; he was arrested and he passed a short period in the jail, in Girona (1923). After being readmitted, definitively Salvador was expelled in 1926 because of his eccentricity. It is said that when he was during an examination requested to speak about Rafael, Dalí responded to the court: “It is impossible for me to speak of that subject in front of the three professors, because I know much more about Rafael than all of you.”
The following year Dalí met Picasso in Paris, and ten years later, in London, Stefan Zweig presented Sigmund Freud to him. He met Luis Buñuel and García Lorca in Madrid in 1923. With Buñuel he made the staging of “The Andalusian dog” and collaborated, in the second period, on the L´age d´or. However, with García Lorca he had a very intimate friendship, how he proved in the tight correspondence maintained between 1925 and 1936. Until that moment, Dalí had not loved anybody in this form. During his years in Paris, he acquired the characteristics of the surrealism. His works in this period (1930) are inspired by the theories of Freud. |
