For my artist report I chose Salvador Dali, the Spanish surrealist painter. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born in the small town of Figueras, Spain on May 11, 1904. He came from a middle-class family and seemed to express a great interest in art from the very beginning. He read many books about art as a young child and had a completed his first oil paintings at the age of eight. At this point he was sent by his parents to live with the Pitchots, an artistically gifted family who lived in the country not far from Dali's hometown of Figueras.
As Dali went into his teen years he began to paint constantly. Most of his works were of the local landscapes and scenes of Spanish domestic life. In 1921 Dali enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Madrid hoping to expand on the base of Impressionism that he had gained as a young man living with the Pitchots.
The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948...
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931), ...
Salvador Dalí Crypt in Dalí Theatre and Museum, ...At the school Dali toiled in the newest styles including Cubism, Futurism, and Purism. It was while he was at the school that Dali would establish a reputation for eccentricity that would define him for the rest of his life. In 1923 Dali was suspended for one year due to insubordination, and subsequently expelled not long after he returned to the school.
In 1925 Dali had his first public show, at the Daulmau Gallery in Barcelona, displaying paintings done in traditional as well as Cubist and Purist styles. The next spring Dali made his first trip to Paris where he met Picasso and was given a private tour of his studio. It was a year or so later when Dali would make his first contact with Surrealism. A major influence in Dali's exploration of Surrealism was his friendship with filmmaker...