Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí is one of the most famous and prolific artists of the twentieth century, his fantastic imagery and flamboyant personality made him the best known artist of the Surrealist movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Born in Figueres, Spain in the northeastern province of Catalonia, Dalí trained in the early 1920s at the Madrid Academy, where he perfected his realistic and meticulously detailed style.

Salvador Dalí was one of the greatest Surrealist artists, using bizarre dream imagery to create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner world. In 1934, the Surrealists censured Dalí. Toward the end of the decade he made several trips to Italy to study the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1940 Dalí fled to the United States, where he worked on theatrical productions, wrote, illustrated books, and painted. A major retrospective of his work opened in 1941 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and traveled throughout the United States.