1904
Salvador Dalí is born on 11 May.
My parents baptized me with the same name as my brother – Salvador – and I was destined, as my name indicates, for nothing less than to rescue painting from the void of modern art […]
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
Every day, I kill the image of my poor brother, with my hands, with kicks, and with dandyism. […] He is my dark God, for he and I are Pollux and Castor; I am Pollux, the immortal twin, and he is the mortal one. I assassinate him regularly, for the ‘Divine Dalí’ cannot have anything in common with this former terrestrial being.
Salvador Dalí, Alain Bosquet, Conversations with Dalí, 1969
1908
His sister Anna Maria is born.
I was the absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My father and mother worshiped me. On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a dazzling king’s costume – a gold crown studded with great topazes and an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in this costume.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
1919
Participates at the age of 15 in his first group exhibition. The local paper writes:
We salute the new artist in the firm hope that in our time our words – our own humble words – will become a prophecy: Salvador Dalí Domènech will become a great painter.
Empordà Federal, 11 January, 1919 (quoted in Dalí. The Centenary Retrospective, 2004)
1921
Dalí’s mother, Felipa Domènech Ferrés, dies.
1922
Dalí’s father marries the sister of his deceased wife. Dalí is accepted at the art academy in Madrid (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando/San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts). At his student lodgings he becomes friends with Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca and Pepín Bello. Despite his eccentric style, Dalí is quickly accepted by the group.
My anti-European way of dressing had made them judge me unfavorably, as a rather commonplace, more or less hairy romantic residue. My serious, studious air, totally lacking in humor, made me appear to their sarcastic eyes a lamentable being, stigmatized with mental deficiency, and at best picturesque. Nothing indeed could contrast more violently with their British-style tailored suits and golf jackets than my velvet jackets and my flowing bow ties; nothing could be more diametrically opposed than my long tangled hair falling down to my shoulders and their smartly trimmed hair […]. They literally drank my ideas, and in a week the hegemony of my thought began to make itself felt.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
{Eventually, however, Dalí decides to dress in the same style as his friends.}
As I was having my hair cut, I thought I would faint at being shorn of the signs of my singularity, but I stuck to it. I bought a sky-blue silk shirt, a pair of sapphire cufflinks, ordered a fashionable suit, and to top it off plastered my hair with a coat of picture varnish that turned it into a plaque as flexible as galalith, giving me a veritable black helmet. In my hand I nonchalantly twirled a bamboo cane [...]. It was the start of a new era …
Salvador Dalí, Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), 1973
1925
At 21, he has his first solo exhibition, at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona.
1926
Participates in several exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona. Travels to Paris, where he is introduced to Pablo Picasso by a mutual friend. Is expelled from the academy after calling his examiners in art theory incompetent:
I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
1928
Exhibits for the first time in the USA, participating in The Twenty-Seventh International Exhibition of Paintings in Pittsburgh.
1929
Writes the script for Un chien andalou together with Luis Buñuel, which opens later that year in Paris. Travels to Paris. Is introduced by the artist Joan Miró to the surrealist group and its founder, the writer André Breton. That summer, he also meets Gala, who is to be his great love and muse. At the time, she is married to the French poet and surrealist Paul Eluard. The couple and their daughter Cécile visit Dalí at his family’s summer house in Cadaqués, together with the gallery owner Camille Goemans, the artist René Magritte and Luis Buñuel. After the other guests have departed, Gala and her daughter stay on for a few weeks.
She was destined to be my Gradiva,¹ ‘she who advances,’ my victory, my wife. But for this she had to cure me, and she did cure me!
¹Gradiva, the novel by W. Jensen, interpreted by Sigmund Freud […] Gradiva is the heroine of this novel, and she effects the psychological cure of the other, the male protagonist.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
Gala drove the forces of death out of me. And first and foremost the obsessive sign of Salvador, my dead elder brother; the Castor whose Pollux I had been, and whose shadow I was becoming. She brought me back to the light through the love she gave me, of which I could feel the emanations.
Salvador Dalí, Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), 1973
Dalí’s relationship to his family deteriorates. His father objects strongly to Dalí’s relationship with the married Gala. He has his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Goemans. André Breton writes the introduction for the catalogue. The exhibited painting Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother makes Dalí’s father furious and the son is thrown out of the house.
1930
The second film made in collaboration with Buñuel, L’âge d’or (The Golden Age), is shown in Paris. He illustrates the first page of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, which Breton dedicates to Dalí. Dalí’s book La femme visible is published. Dalí’s father disinherits his son entirely after seeing the book. Dalí and Gala buy a small fisherman’s cottage in the village of Port Lligat outside Cadaqués. The house, which is extended over the years, eventually becomes their permanent residence.
1931
The painting The Persistence of Memory is shown at Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris. Dalí takes part in the first surrealist exhibition in the USA, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
1932
Participates in the group exhibition Surrealism: Paintings, Drawings and Photographs at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.
1933
Dalí’s first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.
1934
Civil marriage to Gala. Takes part in Exposition du Cinquantenaire in Paris, an exhibition that is boycotted by the other surrealists. Dalí’s participation and his portrayal of Lenin in the exhibited painting The Enigma of William Tell nearly leads to his exclusion from the surrealist group. Illustrates Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. First solo exhibition in London. Travels to the USA for the first time. Solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. During a lecture at the opening he declares:
The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not at all mad. Quoted in Dalí. The Centenary Retrospective, 2004
1935
Reconciled with his family in Figueres. Éditions surréalistes publishes his book La conquête de l'irrationnel (The Conquest of the Irrational) in which he describes his paranoiac-critical method as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretative-critical association of delirious phenomena.” Meets the British poet and patron of surrealism Edward James. Writes the script for the film Les mystères surréalistes de New York, which is never made. Commissioned by the magazine The American Weekly to interpret urban life in America in a series of drawings and articles.
1936
Participates in Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, and International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries, London. In connection with the exhibition in London, he nearly dies during a lecture when the diving helmet he is wearing to illustrate the voyage down into the unconscious gets stuck and prevents him from getting enough air. The Spanish civil war breaks out and his friend Federico García Lorca is one of its casualties. Travels to New York, exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art. On 14 December, Man Ray’s photographic portrait of Dalí is on the cover of Time magazine.
I was soon to learn the breadth of that publication’s influence: I could not cross a street without being recognized and my arm was soon sore from autographing every weird bit of paper shoved under my nose. Salvador Dalí, Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), 1973
Designs The Lobster Telephone for Edward James, who promises to buy all Dalí’s paintings for a year. Dalí sends the American comedian Harpo Marx a harp with strings made of barbed wire for Christmas. In return, Harpo sends him a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.
1937
Meets the Marx brothers in Hollywood. Writes the film script for Giraffes on Horseback Salad together with Harpo. The script (later renamed The Surrealist Woman) is never filmed. His collaboration with the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli results in objects such as Shoe Hat and Lobsterdress. The painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus is exhibited in Paris. Dalí’s poem with the same title is hung next to the painting. The poem is also published.
1938
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organised by André Breton and Paul Eluard, opens at Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. Dalí’s Rainy Taxi is shown in the gallery entrance. The painting The Enigma of Hitler gives the surrealists serious doubts concerning Dalí’s political sympathies. Dalí himself says in Diary of a Genius, 1964: “I could not be a Nazi, because if Hitler conquered Europe he would seize the opportunity to do away with all hysterical characters like myself” The group is convinced, but Dalí is requested to sign a document certifying that he is not an enemy of the proletariat. “I signed this without any qualms, as I have never had any particular feelings either for or against the proletariat”. Visits Sigmund Freud in London. Dalí brings the painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus with him. Spends the autumn in Coco Chanel’s house in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera.
1939
Decorates two shop windows at the Bonwitt Teller department store in New York. The store management alters the arrangement before the windows are uncovered. Dalí is enraged and throws a bath tub through the window. He is arrested but is soon released. Shortly after, the solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery is a success among visitors. Designs the pavilion Dream of Venus for the World’s Fair in New York. Is prohibited from showing a reproduction of Botticelli’s Venus transformed into an inverted mermaid – with a fish head and woman’s legs – on the façade of the pavilion. In protest, Dalí publishes his Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness. The Metropolitan Opera House in New York puts on the ballet Bacchanale for which Dalí wrote the libretto and designed the costumes and sets. Breton refrains from mentioning Dalí in his article “Latest Tendencies in Surrealist Painting”. Dalí is thus entirely excluded from the surrealist group.
The surrealist group appeared to me the sole one offering me an adequate outlet for my activity. Its chief, André Breton, seemed to me irreplaceable in his role of visible chief. I was going to make a bid for power, and for this my influence had to remain occult, opportunistic, and paradoxical. […] If you decide to wage a war for the total triumph of your individuality, you must begin by inexorably destroying those who have the greatest affinity with you. All alliance depersonalizes; everything that tends to the collective is your death; use the collective, therefore, as an experiment, after which strike hard, and remain alone!
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
I am not a Surrealist; I am Surrealism. Surrealism is not a party or a label; it is a state of mind, unique, to each his own, that can be affected by no party line, taboo, or morality. It is the total freedom to be and the right to absolute dreaming.
Salvador Dalí, Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), 1973
1940
I try to create fantastic things, magical things, dreamlike things. The world needs more fantasy. Our civilization is too mechanical. We can make the fantastic real, and then it is more real than that which actually exists.
Salvador Dalí, in Times-Dispatch, 24 November 1940 (quoted in Dalí. The Centenary Retrospective, 2004)
{Dalí and Gala go to the USA where they stay until 1948. Breton, who is also in New York, nicknames Dalí “Avida Dollars” [eager for dollars], an anagram of his name.}
The anagram ‘Avida Dollars’ was a talisman for me. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet, and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danaë was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On The Life of Salvador Dalí Considered as a Work of Art.
Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 1964
1941
Designs jewellery together with the jeweller Duke Fulco di Verdura.
My jewels are a protest against emphasis upon the cost of the materials of jewelry. My object is to show the jeweler’s art in true perspective – where the design and craftsmanship are to be valued above the material worth of the gems, as in Renaissance times.
Salvador Dalí, “Comments on the jewels” (1959), Dalí Jewels, 2001
Organises a costume ball for the benefit of European artists in exile: A Surrealist’s Night in an Enchanted Forest at the luxury hotel Del Monte Lodge in California. More than 1,000 people, including celebrities such as Bob Hope, Gloria Vanderbilt and Ginger Rogers, dine surrounded by 2,000 pine trees, mannequin dolls and animals borrowed from the local zoo. Dalí and Gala sit at the head of the table in Hollywood’s largest bed. The costume ball is a financial failure and does not generate any funding for the cause, but is a success for Dalí personally. The Metropolitan in New York stages the ballet Labyrinth with decor and costumes by Dalí. A retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1942
The autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí is published. The book sells out.
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.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942
1943
Commissioned by Helena Rubinstein, founder of the eponymous cosmetics company, to paint three panels for her New York apartment. Vogue runs a feature on the event. Exhibits portraits of New York celebrities and people from the fashion scene at Knoedler Gallery, New York.
1944
Dalí’s novel Hidden Faces is published. The ballets Sentimental Colloquy, with sets by Dalí, and Mad Tristan, written by Dalí, are staged in New York. Designs the cover for Vogue and writes articles for Life. Designs advertisements for nylon stockings for Bryans Hosiery.
1945
Goes to Hollywood, assigned by Alfred Hitchcock to create the dream sequences in the film Spellbound. In connection with an exhibition at Bignou Gallery in New York, the first issue of the magazine Dalí News, is published by Dalí. He has written all the feature stories, short articles and advertisements himself – and everything is about him.
1946
Walt Disney contacts Dalí with an offer to participate in the production of a cartoon film, Destino. The film is not completed until 2003. Makes three paintings commissioned by the Shulton Company to market the perfume Desert Flower.
1947
The exhibition New Paintings by Salvador Dalí is shown at the Bignou Gallery in New York. It includes a study for the painting Leda Atomica, for which Dalí has requested the assistance of the mathematician Matila Ghyka. At the opening, the second and final issue of Dalí News is distributed.
1948
The book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship is published. In it, Dalí pays tribute to the craftsmanship of Renaissance artists. Creates Dalí Atomicus together with the photographer Philippe Halsman.
1949
Audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. Dalí shows him the painting The Madonna of Port Lligat, and hopes to obtain the Church’s permission to marry Gala. From this year on, Dalí spends the autumns and winters in New York, where he always stays at the St. Regis Hotel.
In New York they always stay at the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Every Sunday afternoon they have people in for tea – champagne tea. Then Dalí takes everyone to dinner at Trader Vic’s. He’s very generous. There are never less than twenty people – all the starving young beauties and transvestites in town. I’m never sure whether Dalí copied transvestites from me or I copied transvestites from Dalí. Gala is always the last one to arrive at dinner. She makes a dramatic entrance on the arm of a teenage boy with long blond hair who played the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar somewhere, once. […] When Gala enters the room, Dalí stands up, snaps his fingers, calls for silence, waves his gold sceptre and announces ‘Gala! Y Jesús Cristu Superstar!’ Everybody claps. It’s like being with royalty or circus people. That’s why I like being with Dalí – because it’s not like being with an artist.
Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 1979
Designs the jewellery Eye of Time and Honeycomb Heart. These are produced together with the New York jewellers Alemany and Ertman, a collaboration that continues for many years.
1950
Commissioned by the Italian government to illustrate Dante’s Divina commedia. His article “The Decadence of Modern Art” is published in Herald American. Also writes articles for Vogue. Dalí’s father dies.
1951
Dalí’s Manifeste mystique (Mystical Manifesto) is published.
And in aesthetics it is up to the mystics and only they to resolve the new ‘golden sections’ of the soul of our time; if a powerful Renaissance of mystical painting has not yet begun, it is due to the fact that the artists, this time very late in relation to today’s scientific progress, still vegetate in the abominable pastures of the last consequences of the most sordid materialism, it is because they have nothing to paint, that today’s artists paint nothing, in other words, what is non-figurative, non-objective, non-expressive, non-non-no no no no no no. NO! Finished are the denials and demotions, finished the Surrealist malaise and existentialist anxiety. Mysticism is the paroxysm of joy in the ultra-individualist affirmation of all man’s heterogeneous tendencies within the absolute unity of ecstasy.
Salvador Dalí, Manifeste mystique (Mystical Manifesto), 1951. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 1998
1952
Gala’s former husband, Paul Eluard, dies. Dalí tours the USA with his lecture “Nuclear Mysticism”, dealing with his new theory that links religion, science and mathematics.
1954
Dalí is obsessed with the shape of the rhinoceros horn that describes a perfect logarithmic curve. Inspired by this shape, and by the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Jan Vermeer’s painting The Lacemaker, he embarks on a film project that lasts for many years. The film is never completed. The book Dalí’s Mustache, a collaboration with Philippe Halsman, is published.
1956
Audience with General Franco. Publishes Les cocus du vieil art moderne (Dalí on Modern Art: The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art).
1957
Designs a surrealist nightclub for a luxury hotel in Acapulco. The building, shaped like a sea urchin on four enormous fly’s legs, is never built. Creates hairstyles together with a famous Hollywood stylist in New York. Walt Disney visits Dalí in Port Lligat and starts planning a film about Don Quixote. The project is never carried out. Designs cutlery for fish and dessert.
1958
Orders a 12-metre baguette that he uses to illustrate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at a lecture in Paris. Dalí and Gala get married again, this time wedded in a church.
It is difficult to hold the world’s interest for more than half an hour at a time. [...] My motto has been: ‘Let them speak of Dalí, even if they speak well of him.’ I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that the papers publish the most incomprehensible news items of our time, sent by teletype. PARIS. Dalí gave a lecture at the Sorbonne on Vermeer’s Lacemaker and the rhinoceros. He arrived in a white Rolls-Royce containing a thousand white cauliflowers. ROME. In the torchlit gardens of the Princess Pallavicini, Dalí was reborn, rising all of a sudden from out of a cubic egg covered with magic inscriptions by Raimondo Lulio, and delivered an explosive oration in Latin.
Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 1964
1959
Designs postcards for the card company Hallmark. Says in an interview in The Herald Tribune Magazine that: “As a Renaissance man, I do not feel distant, as an artist, from the masses. I am prepared to draw anything people ask me to draw” (Quoted in Dalí. The Centenary Retrospective, 2004). Audience with Pope John XXIII. Designs a new vehicle, the Ovocipede.
1960
Makes the documentary Chaos and Creation together with Philippe Halsman. Commissioned by the Vatican to portray the Holy Trinity in a painting. Participates in an international surrealist exhibition at D’Arcy Galleries in New York organised by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and others. The surrealists publish the pamphlet We Don’t EAR it that Way, in which they voice their displeasure concerning Dalí’s participation in the exhibition.
1963
During a book-signing of Robert Descharnes’ The World of Salvador Dalí, Dalí lies in a bed in a shop window connected to an electromyograph that registers his brain waves. These are printed out on a sheet of paper and accompany each book copy as a gift. Dalí’s book Le mythe tragique de “L’Angélus” de Millet (The Tragic Legend of the Angelus by Millet), is published, in which Dalí applies his paranoiac-critical method to Jean-François Millet’s painting Angelus (1857–59), a painting that has fascinated and inspired him since the 1930s. The Knoedler Gallery in New York features the exhibition Hommage à Crick et Watson, dedicated to the Nobel Laureates Crick and Watson.
1964
Dalí’s book Journal d’un génie (Diary of a Genius) is published.
1965
Filmed by Andy Warhol for his Screen Tests series. Dalí is asked to manage the artistic side of the production of the science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage. Meets Amanda Lear, who becomes his muse. Retrospective exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in New York.
1966
The documentary Autoportrait mou de Salvador Dalí (Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí), directed by Jean-Christophe Averty and Dalí, with Orson Wells as the voiceover, is banned in the USA due to scenes featuring violence.
1967
Illustrates Mao Tse-Tung’s poems. Designs an ashtray for Air India. In return, Dalí is given an elephant, which he donates to the zoo in Barcelona. Moderna Museet buys the painting The Enigma of William Tell.
1968
Participates in Dada-Surrealism and their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After the May protests in Paris, Dalí publishes his own manifesto, Ma révolution culturelle (My Cultural Revolution) which is distributed to students at the Sorbonne.
I, Salvador Dalí, an apostolic Roman Catholic, apolitical to the highest degree and spiritually monarchist, I note with modesty and jubilation that all the enthusiasms of today’s creative youth are united around a single virtue: opposition to the bourgeois culture. The most beautiful and the most profound cultural revolutions were made without barricades, with the insurrectional violence animating solely the spirit, the master of space and time.
Salvador Dalí, Ma révolution culturelle (My Cultural Revolution), 1968. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 1998
1969
Buys a castle in Púbol near Cadaqués and has it decorated for Gala. The airline Braniff launches a campaign featuring famous people, including Andy Warhol and Dalí. Dalí designs a poster for the Eurovision Song Contest in Madrid and the logotype for the Spanish confectionery company Chupa Chups.
1971
Designs chess pieces for the American Chess Foundation, following a request made by Marcel Duchamp in 1964. All the pieces are casts of his fingers, except the queens, which are casts of Gala’s fingers. Casts of the salt and pepper shakers from the St. Regis Hotel are used as towers. The Morse Dalí collection is opened to the public thanks to the opening of the Salvador Dalí Museum in Cleveland, USA. Dalí designs the Christmas edition of French Vogue.
1972
Dalí creates holograms in collaboration with Dennis Gabor, Nobel Laureate in Physics. Writes the opera poem Être-Dieu.
1973
Dalí’s holograms are shown at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, including the First Cylindric Crono-Hologram, Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain. Retrospective exhibition at Louisiana in Denmark. The exhibition tours later that year to Moderna Museet. The books Dix recettes d’immortalité (Ten Recipes for Immortality), Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), and Les dîners de Gala (Gala’s Dinners) are published.
There is no urgency for me greater than to become Dalí, that is, the center of the greatest tension of intelligence, sensuality, and power that there is.
Salvador Dalí, Comment on devient Dalí (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí), 1973
1974
Provides the introduction and illustrations to Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism. The Dalí Theatre-Museum, created by Dalí himself, is inaugurated in his hometown Figueres.
1977
The book Les Vins de Gala (Gala’s Wines) is published.
1979
Gala always calls herself ‘Gala’ and Dalí always calls himself ‘Dalí.’ They never say ‘I.’ So they use their own names a lot. In fact, ‘Gala’ is almost the only word Gala ever uses because she’s the strong silent type. Dalí makes long winding speeches in Spanish, French, and English – all at once. I never understand a word he says. Except ‘Dalí’ and ‘Gala.’
Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 1979
1981
Spanish King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía visit Dalí in Port Lligat.
1982
The Salvador Dalí Museum is inaugurated in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Gala’s health deteriorates. She dies on 10 June in Port Lligat. King Juan Carlos I makes Dalí Marquis of Púbol.