Salvador DaliSalvador Dali, was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech at 8:45 a.m., Monday, May 11, 1904, in the small town, at the foot of the Pyrenees, of Figueres, Spain, about sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. His parents supported his talent and built him his first studio, while he was still a child, in their summer home. Dali later attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain, married Gala Eluard in 1934, and died on January 23, 1989, in a hospital in his hometown. Dali did not limit himself to a particular style or medium. From his early Impressionist work through his Surrealist works, for which he is best known, and ending with what is known as his Classical period, it becomes apparent how varied his styles and mediums are. He has worked with oils, watercolors, drawings, sculptures, graphics and even films. Dali held his first solo exhibition in Barcelona in 1925, where his talents were first recognized. He became internationally known when some of his paintings were exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. The following year he joined the Paris Surrealist group and began his love affair with Gala who became more than his lover, she was his commercial director. , muse and greatest inspiration. Surrealism emerged from what was left of Dada in the early 1920s and unlike Dada, a nihilistic movement, Surrealism had a promising and more positive view of art and thus gained many converts. It started as a literary movement in a Parisian magazine. What they had in common was their belief in the importance of the unconscious and its manifestations, as Freud emphasized. They believed that through the unconscious, a plethora of artistic images would be revealed. Both of these movements were also anti-establishment and rejected traditional Western Judeo-Christian beliefs and moral values ​​and believed that reason and logic had failed in man's quest for self-knowledge. The Surrealists differed from Dada in another ideological aspect. The Surrealists believed that man could actually improve the human condition, which is the major difference between the two movements. A few years before his marriage to Gala in 1934, Dali established himself as a leader of the surrealist movement. Although Dali was intrigued by surrealist technology...... middle of paper ...... in his childhood. This particular work is officially considered a work of surrealism, but Dali's transition from surrealism by the very means that brought him to surrealism, to the paranoid-critical method, is evident. Around the time Dali was working on his eighteen large canvases, he returned to his Catholic upbringing and renewed his vows with Gala in Spain. In 1974, Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in the town where he grew up, Figueres. Gala died in 1982 and Dali's health began to deteriorate. Later there was a fire in the Gala Castle in which Dali found himself seriously and as a result his health deteriorated further. Two years later, he had a pacemaker implanted and spent his life in almost total isolation. On January 23, 1989, Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech died in a hospital in Figueres from heart failure and respiratory complications. Works CitedDali, Salvador. English translation by Haakon M. Chevalier. The secret life of Salvador Dali. New York, NY: 1942. De La Croix, Horst, Richard G. Tansey, Diane Kirkpatrick. Art through the ages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, editors; New York, NY: 1991.Moorhouse,: 1993.