Salvador Dali’s eccentric personality

Salvador Dali has marked minds because of both his physical aspect, his appalling statements and because of his work. Great artist whose paintings verge on genious, he was a man out of the common, known for his taste for the bizarre.

Outstanding personality

The originality of Salvador Dali, though macabre, emerges unintendedly from his birth. Born in 1904 in Figueres, Spain, Salvador Dali inherited his name from his elder brother, who died shortly before his birth. His existence will always be influenced by the shadow of this late brother whose life Salvador will think always to have "stolen". Throughout his career, he will try to become the unique Salvador Dali.

Since his childhood, Salvador is tormented by his strong but tinged nature of much shyness and phobias, which will push him to lock himself up into his own fantasy world and show his gift of painting. He paints his first painting at the age of seven. Additionally to this, Dali described himself as perverse and dedicated, as a child, to strange pleasures judged by the majority of the population; For example, resorting excessively to solitary pleasures, urinating his bed intentionally or practicing without embarrassment exhibitionism in order to shock the servants.

Rebel at heart

Salvador Dali has always had a like for provocation. Already as a student at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, he refused the authority of his teachers, judging them as too mediocre to teach, and made very few friends. Fascinated by the psychology of Freud, Dali decides to combine his art and the urges he feels as well as his love for the world of dreams. He quickly understands that his job will be sold if he has his own originality and draws blithely in his prolific imagination, full of symbols. Dali attempts to join several artistic movements before adopting his own style, which will make him a world-famous artist, impossible to classify. He will join for a few years the surrealist movement and even marry Gala, former companion of Paul Eluard. He will, however, rejected from the movement, considered too fanciful or mentally ill. Lonely, he will nevertheless continue his research and establish a new working method called "critical-paranoia" where his paintings depict dream symbols, fantasies stacked in the form of pictorial rebus with impeccable technique.

His greatest works will result from this method.

Statements shrouded in scandal

Besides painting, there is another area in which Dali was able to stand out and it is in communication. His remarks surprised, shocked. We even find it downright crazy and megalomaniac. Dali was accustomed, for example, to qualifying himself as a genius, who only Leonardo da Vinci could match. We will never know if Dali was playing his eccentricity or if he really thought everything he said but that was part of the mystery surrounding this world famous and recognized Art icon.

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“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
See more quote by Salvador Dali