Salvador Dalí Biography (1904-1989)

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras, Catalonia, in 1904. He was both artistic and eccentric from an early age. He later claimed that the death of his older brother, also called Salvador, nine months before he was born, contributed to his intense desire for attention and bizarre behaviour.

Dalí began studying at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1921, but was expelled 3 years later for rebellious behaviour. This included refusing to take an examination because he felt that the teachers were not qualified to judge his work. However, his talent had already earned him a successful one-man show at the Galeria Dalmau in Barcelona.

Dalí experimented with various styles but settled on Surrealism. He made the first Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, in 1929. During the next few years, Dalí painted some of his most famous pictures. The Persistence of Memory, from 1931, is on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works were filled with bizarre double images and he used a detailed, realistic technique to create imaginative scenes that he called his ‘hand-painted dream photographs’. In 1936, he attended the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and gave a lecture dressed in a diver's suit. This was just one of his publicity stunts.

In 1939, Dalí quarrelled with the founding father of Surrealism, Breton, and was officially expelled from the movement. However, he had already begun to produce more naturalistic pieces due to the Renaissance art that he saw on his numerous visits to Italy. He left Europe when war broke out, and lived in America until 1948. During this time he produced numerous paintings, and the first of his colourful autobiographies, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. He also became involved in design work, including a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film, Spellbound.

Dalí’s later paintings included strongly sexual pieces featuring his wife, and also religious works. Of these, the Christ of St John of the Cross is on display in the St Mungo Museum, Glasgow. It was bought by Glasgow City Art Gallery in 1952, and was highly controversial because of its excessively high price. Other religious works include Crucifixion, which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Sacrament of the Last Supper that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Dalí produced the second of his autobiographical works, entitled, Diary of a Genius, in 1964. However, towards the end of his life, Dalí became a recluse. He died in 1989. Two museums are dedicated to his work. The Teatre-Museu Dalí, was established in Figueras, Spain, in 1974, and the Salvador Dalí Museum, in St Petersburg, Florida, was established in 1982.

Throughout his life, Dalí was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, film-maker, and writer. He was also one of the leading figures in Surrealism. However, it was none of these, but it was actually his enormous talent for self-publicity that made him an international celebrity.

Pablo Picasso Biography (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881. A naturally gifted artist, he moved with his family to Barcelona in 1895. He spent a year studying at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, and won a gold medal with his large academic canvas, Science and Charity, which is now on display in Picasso Museum, Barcelona. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, when he was 16, but only stayed a few months before he opened his first studio in Barcelona.

Picasso spent the four years from 1900 between Paris and Barcelona. He painted pictures of the bohemian life in Paris, and was most heavily influenced by the works of Degas, and Toulouse-Latrec. His Blue Room, painted in 1901, is the best example of this. It is now on display in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Because various shades of blue dominated his rather melancholic paintings from 1901 until 1904 it has become known as his Blue Period.

He finally settled in Paris in 1904. His paintings now became far more cheerful, and the blue was replaced by pink. This Rose Period lasted for the next year or so, and a common theme of the paintings that he produced during this time was the circus. The Family of Saltimbanques, painted in 1905, is on display in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. This is the first of many paintings where Picasso used the figure of the harlequin to represent his alter ego. Picasso began to attract more influential patrons, and painted numerous portraits. One of Gertrude Stein, the American writer, now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1906, Picasso produced pieces that were heavily influenced by Greek, Iberian, and African art and entered his Cubism period. This is evident in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is now on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The picture includes heavily distorted figures that are recreated as having components, rather than natural body form, typical of Cubism. He produced a number of works including a portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. This is now on display in the Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso’s cubism took on another dimension when he began working on collages with paper and cloth. His first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, is on display in the Musée Picasso in Paris. He also produced a number of fine pencil drawings including a portrait, Vollard, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Picasso also revolutionized sculpture by creating pieces from everyday materials. One example, Guitar, is made of cardboard, paper, and string, and is on display in the Musée Picasso in Paris. As this technique was taken up by other sculptors of the time, it became known as Constructivism.

Picasso’s love life also had an influence on his work. He painted realistic portraits of his first wife, and son, in the early years from 1917. However, as the marriage disintegrated he moved into darker, more surrealistic images during the mid-1920s. He fell in love again, in the early 1930s, and his paintings took on another lighter mood. However, his most important work,Guernica , was a far darker picture. It was influenced by events during the Spanish Civil War. It now hangs in the Reina Sofía Art Centre in Madrid. Picasso died in 1973.

Francisco Goya Biography (1746-1828)

Francisco Goya was born in 1746 in a small town near Zaragoza. When he was 14 he began a 4 year apprenticeship to a local master, José Luzan. Goya then left for Madrid with the intention of winning a prize at the Academy of San Fernando. Although he didn’t win, he met the court artist Francisco Bayeu who was to prove influential in forming Goya’s early style.

Bayeu was heavily influenced by the German painter Anton Taphael Mengs, and passed elements of this style on to Goya. Bayeu was also instrumental in Goya’s first involvement in a commission. This was the fresco decoration of the Church of the Virgin in El Pilar in Zaragoza.

From 1773, after spending a year in Italy, Goya worked on a number of other fresco projects, including one for the Charterhouse of Aula Dei, near Zaragoza. However, it was in 1798 that he worked on his greatest fresco project for the Church of San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid. Goya had now begun working on prints based on paintings by one of his two greatest sources of inspiration, Velázquez. Rembrandt was the other artist that Goya drew inspiration from.

Goya began working on official portraits commissioned by King Charles III around 1786. One of his paintings from this time, Marquesa de Pontejos, is on display in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He also worked on several tapestry cartoons depicting Spanish life, and these revolutionized the Spanish tapestry industry. However, in the winter of 1792, Goya’s life took a dramatic turn when he became totally deaf after a serious illness. Not surprisingly, this led to much of his subsequent work having a pessimistic air to it. He drew and etched the first in a series of prints, the satirical Los Caprichos (The Caprices). Others followed, including the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), and Disparates (Absurdities).

Goya had witnessed the horrors of war, at first hand, during the French occupation of Spain, and he drew on this for two of the paintings that he completed in 1814. The Second of May, 1808 and Third of May, 1808 both depict brutal massacres of his countrymen by the French. The thick, bold strokes of dark colour that he used were typical of many of his later paintings. Another characteristic of Goya’s paintings towards the end of his life was that they had an openness and honesty, especially his portraits. His portrait, Family of Charles IV, portrays the Royals in a realistic manner, and not idealized as many other artists did. It is on display in Prado Museum in Madrid.

Towards the end of his life, Goya painted a series of fresco scenes on the walls of his country house. These were the Black Paintings, and he used mainly blacks, browns and greys to depict scenes of witchcraft. Goya was evidently becoming depressed by the political situation in Spain, and these paintings reflected his mood. He was forced to leave Spain in 1824, because of the oppression in his native land, and moved to France. Goya began to pursue the then new art of lithography, and he produced a series of bullfight scenes that are among the best lithographs ever made. He died, in France, in 1828.

Diego Velazquez Biography (1599-1660)

Diego Velázquez was probably Spain’s greatest baroque artist. He was born in Seville, in 1599. Between the ages of 11 and 16 he worked as an apprentice to the Mannerist painter, Francisco Pacheco. This was where he also gained the influences of Flemish and Italian realism.

For the first few years after he had served his apprenticeship, Velázquez's works fell into three categories. These were the bodegón, which comprised everyday subjects combined with still life, portraits, and religious scenes. He also showed a strong bias towards naturalism. One of his earliest bodegones was The Meal, which is now on display in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. This may have been his first work as an independent master.

Another of the early bodegones that he produced, the Water Seller of Seville, is on display at Apsley House in London. This is often compared with the work of Caravaggio because it has a very clever use of light and shadow, and is a realistic portrayal of nature. Velázquez used the people of Seville as models for his religious paintings and his Adoration of the Magi, now on display in the Prado in Madrid , actually includes portraits of his own family and a self-portrait for the biblical figures. Velázquez moved in the intellectual circles of Seville, and was introduced to many of the poets and writers of the time. This was to influence him later in his life when his work adopted more Classical themes. In 1622, he painted a portrait of the great poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, which now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Velázquez travelled to Madrid in 1623, and painted a portrait of King Philip IV, which is now on display in the Prado in Madrid. After this he was appointed the King’s official painter. He spent the majority of the next 6 years painting portraits of the Royal Family. He also painted some mythological pictures, The Drinkers, which is also on display in the Prado. His depiction of the people drinking with the God of wine is a good example of how interested Velázquez was in realism, but still maintains his mythological theme. In 1929, Velázquez left for Italy, and spent the next two years travelling around the country. During his time there he studied Italian art and current trends. One of the works that he produced on his travels, Joseph and His Brothers, is on display in El Escorial, near Madrid. This combines the sculptural style of Michelangelo with the light and shadow techniques of many of the Italian masters.

When Velázquez returned to Madrid he continued as the court painter. He produced many notable works, including Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, which is on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also contributed to the decoration of the throne room in the new royal palace of Buen Retiro, alongside some of the most famous painters of the day. His most famous piece is the battle picture the Surrender of Breda. This is now on display in the Prado, and is the most celebrated historical composition of Spanish Baroque art. Velázquez continued as court painter and architect until his death in 1660.

El Greco Biography (1541-1614)

El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, 1541. ‘El Greco’ actually means ‘The Greek’, and is a direct reference to his heritage. There is little known about his early life and training, but it is evident from his later work that he was influenced by the late Byzantine style of the time. Around 1566, he went to Venice and studied under the High Renaissance masters, Titian and Tintoretto. Some of the earliest of his works show their strong influence. El Greco combined Titian’s use of colour and Tintoretto’s compositions of people and use of space, and this is evident in his paintings. One such example, Christ Healing the Blind Man, is on display at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, Germany.

In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome and was further influenced by some of the great Italian artists and sculptors of the time, including Michelangelo. Two examples of how Michelangelo directly influenced his work are displayed in the United States; Pietà at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Purification of the Temple at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. El Greco also studied Roman architecture which gave his drawings a more solid quality.

El Greco moved to Spain in 1577. His first Spanish commission was for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. The Assumption of the Virgin is now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. El Greco had based this on his old master, Titian's, Assumption but now showed that he was developing his own style. He used unusual colours, groupings and proportions for the figures. Throughout the rest of El Greco’s career, these differences would become more pronounced.

What El Greco really wanted was to secure the commission to fresco the walls of the newly built royal monastery-palace of El Escorial near Madrid, which had been completed in 1582. In an attempt to do this, he submitted several paintings to Philip II for approval but was denied the commission. The Triumph of the Holy League was one of these, and there are versions on display in El Escorial today, and in the National Gallery, London. Around this time, El Greco also worked for Toledo Cathedral, in the town where he was living. One of these, The Disrobing of Christ, was actually the cause of the first of several lawsuits brought by the artist against his patrons. They felt he was charging too much for the work, and were refusing to pay.

Perhaps one of El Greco’s great masterpieces, The Burial of Count Orgaz, is still on display in the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. He painted this in 1586, and it shows two of El Greco’s trademark features; the elongation of his figures, and also his ‘horror vacui’. This dread of unfilled spaces became even more evident in his later works. These two characteristics are often associated with Mannerism, and it seems as though El Greco was influenced by this style, even after its popularity had faded. However, one thing is clear from all of El Greco’s main works, and that was his intense spirituality. There is almost a mystic quality to many of them, and this increased until his death in 1614.