Beginnings…
Salvador Domenec Felip Jacint Dali Domenech also known as
“Salvador Dali” 1904-1989
Salvador Dali was born on the 11th of May, 1904, in the Spanish town of Figueres. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only 16 miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia.His father (in the painting below), Salvador Dali i Cusi, and mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres, provided Dali and his sister with a comfortable upbringing. The son of a prosperous notary, Dali spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family’s summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques, where his parents built his first studio.
Dali’s life was overshadowed by the death of his brother, the first-born child of the family; who died when he was scarcely two years old from gastroenteritis. The child Salvador saw himself as nothing more than a substitute for his dead brother. “Throughout the whole of my childhood and youth I lived with the perception that I was a part of my dead brother. That is, in my body and my soul, I carried the clinging carcass of this dead brother because my parents were constantly speaking about the other Salvador.”
The young Salvador Dali sketched from an early age and was encouraged by his supportive mother. His first art lessons were at his Catholic private school, where the eight-year-old also learned French, which was later to become his second mother tongue.Dali’s oldest existing works date from the year 1914. Oil paintings by the eleven-year-old also exist, mostly as copies of masterpieces which he found in his father’s collection of art books. Dali’s mother died of breast cancer when he was 16 years old. He said his mother’s death “was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshiped her…I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.” After her death, Dali’s father married the sister of his deceased wife; Dali somewhat resented this marriage. 
Salvador Dali
In 1922, Salvador Dali moved to study painting at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. During his studies, he experimented with forms of Cubism, which emphasized the flat, two-dimensional, fragmented surface of the picture plane. This style rejects perspective, foreshortening, modeling and contrast between light and dark (chiaroscuro ) in favor of geometric forms. Dadaism also became one of Dali’s interests. In this movement, artists utilize images and verbal associations from the irrational, subconscious mind. While in Madrid, he began to develop a reputation as an eccentric; attracting attention with his manner of dress, hairstyles and comments on art. He befriended Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel, who he would work with during his career. Dali also read Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams,” which had a tremendous influence on his art. In October of 1926, Dali was expelled from the Academy for refusing to take his final exam in the Theory of Fine Art, stating that his professors could not competently grade him.