Best known for his surrealistic paintings, Salvador Dali is a Spanish artist who discovers an interest in art at a young age. With archival video and voiceovers of Dali, his sister Anna Maria, Dali’s father, and others, filmmaker David Pujol recreates Dali’s life from his birth in 1904 until his death in 1989.
Pujol is assisted by narrators Montse Aguer, Director of the Salvador Dali Museums, and Jordi Artigas, Coordinator of the Salvador Dali Houses Museums. Many of Dali’s famous works are shown in this expansive three-part film.
At the turn of the 20th century, Salvador Dali is born into an art world largely emphasizing impressionism and other art forms like cubism. Born in 1904 in Figueres, Spain, a well-off city near the Italian border, Dali is given his deceased brother’s name who died three years earlier from meningitis. Dali describes how this “other Salvador” greatly affected his childhood.
Dali becomes fascinated with art and begins drawing and painting at the age of six after his father gives him a collection of art books. By age fourteen, he has his first public exhibition in Figueres. The landscapes surrounding the Dali family’s summer home in Cadaques on the Mediterranean have featured in Dali’s early work as well as portraits of his sister Anna Maria. When his mother becomes ill and dies in 1921, Dali buries himself in work and completes 40 pictures.
In 1922 Dali is admitted into the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and is accepted by a group of young men who are aspiring intellectuals, artists, poets, and filmmakers. Here Dali paints his first cubist artwork and later travels to Paris to visit Picasso. After quitting the academy, Dali returns to Figueres and prepares works to take to Paris where he switches his artistic interests to Surrealism, "where the unconscious mind shows what’s hidden by the conscious mind”.
Disappointed at not meeting a lady there, Dali returns to Cadaques and obtains his first small home: a fisherman’s hut in a bay called Portlligat. With the Mediterranean Sea, olive trees, and arid rocky land, Dali remarks: “my painting can’t be understood without getting to know Portlligat”.
Dali begins to find his own style and meets his future partner and wife Gala. Dali improves his studio as he expands the house with more sections and travels between New York, Paris, and Portlligat. When the Spanish Civil War breaks out, Dali and Gala flee to Europe and then stay in the United States until World War II ends.
In his later years, Dali becomes interested in myths, abstract art, pop art, and installations. Dali renovates a castle home for Gala and helps design his Theater Museum in Figueres. Taking a special effort to portray and explain Dali and his art, this film is recommended. Aud: H, C, P.