Born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres (Girona), near Catalonia. Son of the notary public Salvador Dalí Cusí and his wife Felipa Domènech Ferrés. 

Beginnings
            As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. In the late 1920s, two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style:

     • His discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic significance of  subconscious imagery;   

     • His affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who  sought to establish the "greater reality" of man's subconscious over his reason. 

Surrealism
        To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.”He took part in the Students Original Art Works Competition Exhibition of the Catalan Students’Association, heldat Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, where his work Market  was awarded the University Vice-Chancellor’s prize. In Madrid, he attended the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando) and lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he befriended a group of young people who were also to become with time leading intellectual and artistic personalities: Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Pedro Garfias, Eugenio Montes and Pepín Bello, among others. He began to write a notebook which he entitled Ninots. Ensatjos sobre pintura. Catalec dels cuadrus em notes (Puppets. Essays on Painting. Catalogue of Paintings Wiv’ Notes), containing valuable information about Dalí’s progress as an artist. It was probably in this period that he received his first information about Cubist painting through the futuristic catalogue Pittura Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico) that Pepito Pichot had brought him from Paris, as well as through foreign journals such as Esprit nouveau and Valori Plastici, passed on to him by his uncle Anselm Domènech, who owned a major bookshop in Barcelona and whom Dalí has asked to take him out a subscription.

Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.Perhaps the most famous of these enigmatic images is "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), in which limp, melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape.

Rose	Elephants

  With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, Dalí also made two Surrealistic films:

      • Un Chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog); and

       • L'Âge d'or (1930; The Golden Age). 

Both films are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images.

 Renaissance
In the late 1930s, Dalí switched to painting in a more academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and as a consequence he was expelled from the Surrealist movement.Thereafter, he spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry, as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955.

FEMALE SEATED NUDE 

In the period from 1950 to 1970, his Classical Period, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centering on his wife, Gala. The most interesting and revealing of his books is The secret life of Salvador Dali.

THE EYE