Salvador Dali
Prince of Cups
1979
Lithograph, 21/250
Arwork donated by A.C. Lubash in 1984
Salvador Dali was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Daft y Domenech in the Catalan town of Figueras, Spain, on May 11, 1904. In 1921 he enrolled in the Real Academia de Bellas Arttes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he became a friend of frederico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buneuel. His first solo show was held in 1925 at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona. In 1926 Dali was expelled from the Academia and the following year he visited Paris and met Pablio Picasso. He collaborated with Bunuel on the film Un Chien andalouin 1928. At the end of the year he returned to Paris and met Tristan Tzara and Paul Eluard. About this time Dali produced his first Surrealist publications and illustrated the works of Surrealist writers and poets. His first solo show in the United States took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933. Dali was censured by the Surrealists in 1934. Toward the end of the decade he made several trips to Italy to study the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1940 Dali 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. In 1942 Dali published his autobiography and began
exhibiting at M Knoedler an Company in new York. He returned to Europe in 1948, settling Port Lligat, Spain. His first paintings with religious subjects date from 1948-49. In 1954 a Dali retrospective was held at the Palazzo Pallavicini in Rome and in 1964 an important retrospective of his work was shown in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto. He continued painting, writing, and illustrating in 1971, and the Dalinian Holgraphic Room opened at M Knoedler and Company, New York, in 1973. In 1980 a major Dali retrospective was held at the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, and his work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery, London. The artist died on January 23, 1989, in Figueras.