Artists & Works

STYLE: SURREALISM

Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain. He studied at the Academia de San Fernando, in Madrid, where he met Luis Bunuel, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and other Spanish intellectuals who were to influence him throughout his life. Soon after being expelled from this school, Dali began to travel and to exhibit his Cubist-influenced and realist early work. He joined the Surrealists in 1929, was “expelled” in 1934, and in the forties began the work known as his “classic” period, large narrative oil paintings, often about science and religion, and filled with poetic, metaphysical, and humorous insights. Enormously successful and a notorious public figure in America and Europe, the name Dali has become synonymous with surrealism, regardless of his 1934 expulsion. His works are among the most visited in major museums throughout the world. There is also the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, with three facilities in Spain, including Dali’s own museum, the Teatre-Museum Dalí in Figueres, and a Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. As one of the most well-known artists in the world, Dali’s fans are dedicated, and many Dali societies and clubs have been founded.

Dali was a prolific graphic artist and a superb draftsman, as well as a painter and sculptor. The artist was obsessed with food and wrote extensively about it. He devoted a cookbook to his wife and muse, Gala: Les Diners de Gala, published in 1973. These prints (there are twelve in the set) are meant to accompany the cookbook.