Dali Gallery

Salvador Dali Graphics

Salvador Dali Sculptures

Salvador Dali

Gallery One Writer's Square

Paintings Graphics Sculptures

Denver Colorado Art Gallery

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, in the town of Figueres, in the Emporda region close to the French border, in Catalonia, Spain, son of the confortably off middle-class notary Salvador Dali i Cusi and Felipa Domenech Ferres. Dali's father, a lwayer who was a strict disciplinarian, was tempered by his wife who encouraged her son's drawing. Dalí had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died prior to Dalí’s birth. He also had a sister Ana María, 3 years younger than him.

Dalí attended Municipal Drawing School, where he first received formal art training. In 1916 Dalí discovered modern painting on a summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.

The next year Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919. In 1921 Dalí’s mother died of cancer, when he was only 16 years old. After her death, Dalí’s father married the sister of his deceased wife; Dalí somewhat resented this marriage.

In 1922 Dalí moved in to the "Residencia de Estudiantes" (Students' Residence) in Madrid. There he met the artists Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca with whom he would become great friends whilst studying together at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric, wearing long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings and knee breeches in the fashion style of a century earlier. But his paintings, where he experimented with Cubism, got him the most attention from his fellow students (though in these earliest Cubist works he probably did not completely understand the movement, his only information on Cubist art having come from a few magazine articles and a catalogue given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time).