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At the age of 37, Salvador Dalí wrote his autobiography. Titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the Spanish painter portrays his childhood, his student days in Madrid, and the early years of his fame in Paris up to his leaving to go to the USA in 1940. The exactness of his descriptions are doubtful in more than one place. Dates are very often incorrect, and many childhood experiences fit too perfectly into the story of his life.

Dutch Interior (Copy after Manuel Benedito)

1914

Oil on canvas, 16 × 20 cm

Joaquín Vila Moner Collection, Figueras

The image that Dalí created of himself in 1942, and further developed in the years up to his death in 1989, shows an eccentric person, most at ease when placed in posed settings. Despite this tendency, Dalí often revealed intimate details of his life in front of the camera. This act of self-disclosure, as Dalí explains in his autobiography, is a form of vivisection, a laying bare of the living body carried out in the name of pure narcissism.

Portrait of Lucia

1918

Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 33 cm

Private collection

The more Dalí showed himself in public, the more he concealed himself. His masks became ever larger and ever more magnificent: he referred to himself as “genius” and “god-like”. Whoever the person behind the Dalí image really was remains a mystery.

Dalí’s memories appear to begin two months before his birth on May 11th, 1904.

Self-Portrait in the Studio

c. 1919

Oil on canvas, 27 × 21 cm

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

Recalling this period, he describes the “intra-uterine paradise” defined by “colors of Hell, that are red, orange, yellow and bluish, the color of flames, of fire; above all it was warm, still, soft, symmetrical, doubled and sticky.” His most striking memory of birth, of his expulsion from paradise into the bright, cold world, consists of two eggs in the form of mirrors floating in mid-air, the whites of which are phosphorising: “These eggs of fire finally merged together with a very soft amorphous white paste, characterized by their extreme elasticity. Technical objects were to become my biggest enemy later on, and as for watches, they had to be soft or not at all.”

Port of Cadaqués at Night

1919

Oil on canvas, 18.7 × 24.2 cm

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

Dalí’s life is overshadowed by the death of his brother. On August 1st, 1903, the first-born child of the family, scarcely two years old, died from gastroenteritis. The child Salvador sees himself as nothing more than a substitute for the 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.” Out of fear that the second-born child could also sicken and die, Salvador was particularly cosseted and spoiled. He was surrounded by a cocoon of female attention, not just spun by his mother Felipa Doménech Ferrés, but also later by his grandmother Maria Ana Ferrés and his aunt Catalina.

Portrait of José M. Torres

c. 1920

Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 39.5 cm

Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona

Portrait of the Cellist Ricardo Pichot

1920

Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 49 cm

Private collection, Cadaqués

Dalí reported that his mother continually admonished him to wear a scarf when he went outdoors. If he got sick, he enjoyed being allowed to remain in bed. Dalí’s sister Ana Maria, four years younger, writes in her book, Salvador Dalí visto por su hermana (Salvador Dalí, Seen through the Eyes of His Sister), that their mother only rarely let Salvador out of her sight and frequently kept watch at his bedside at night, for when he suddenly awoke, startled out of sleep, to find himself alone, he would start a terrible fuss.

Portrait of Hortensia, Peasant Woman from Cadaqués

1920

Oil on canvas, 35 × 26 cm

Private collection

Salvador enjoyed the company of the women and especially that of the eldest, his grandmother and Lucia (his nurse). He had very little contact with children of his own age. He often played alone. He would disguise himself as a king and observe himself in the mirror: “With my crown, a cape thrown over my shoulders, and otherwise completely naked. Then I pressed my genitals back between my thighs, in order to look as much like a girl as possible. Even then I admired three things: weakness, age and luxury.”

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael

1920–1921

Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 53 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

Dalí’s mother loved him unreservedly, even lionized him. With his father, Dalí enjoyed a different type of relationship. Salvador Dalí y Cusi was a notary in the Catalan market-town of Figueras, near the Spanish-French border. An anti-Catholic free thinker, he decided not to send his son Salvador to a church school, as would have befitted his social status, but to a state school.

Landscape near Cadaqués

1920–1921

Oil on canvas, 31 × 34 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

Only when Salvador failed to reach the required standard in the first year did his father allow him to transfer to a Catholic private school of the French “La Salle” order. There, among other things, the eight-year-old learned French, which was later to become his second mother tongue, and received his first lessons in painting and drawing.

Self-Portrait

c. 1921

Oil on canvas, 36.8 × 41.8 cm

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

At about the same time as Salvador was receiving his first lessons from the brothers of the “La Salle” order, he set-up his first atelier in the old, disused washroom in the attic of his family home: “I placed my chair in the concrete basin and arranged the high-standing wooden board (that protects washerwomen’s clothing from the water) horizontally across it so that the basin was half covered. This was my workbench!”

Festival at San Sebastián

1921

Gouache on cardboard, 52 × 75 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

Dalí’s oldest existing works date from the year 1914. They are small-format watercolors, landscape studies of the area around Figueras.

Oil paintings by the eleven-year-old also exist, mostly as copies of masterpieces which he found in his father’s well-stocked collection of art books. For Salvador, the atelier became the “sanctuary” of his loneliness.

Scene in Cabaret

1922

Oil on canvas, 52 × 41 cm

Bénédicte Petit Collection, Paris

In the laundry-room atelier the little king tried out a new costume: “I started to test myself and to observe; as I performed hilarious eye-winking antics accompanied by a subliminal spiteful smile, at the edge of my mind, I knew, vague as it was, that I was in the process of playing the role of a genius. Ah, Salvador Dalí! You know it now: if you play the role of a genius, you will also become one!”

Family Scene

1923

Oil and gouache on coardboard, 105 × 75 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

Later Dalí analysed his behavior: “In order to wrest myself from my dead brother, I had to play the genius so as to ensure that at every moment I was not in fact him, that I was not dead; as such, I was forced to put on all sorts of eccentric poses.”

Salvador’s attempts to distance himself from his dead brother went so far that he believed himself immortal. Descending the stairs one day at school, it suddenly occured to him that he should let himself fall.

The Sick Child (Self-Portrait in Cadaqués)

c. 1923

Oil and gouache on cardboard, 57 × 51 cm

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

But at the very last moment fear held him back. However, he worked out a plan of action for the next day: “At the very moment I was descending the stairs with all my classmates, I did a fantastic leap into the void, and landing on the steps below bowled over and over until I finally reached the bottom. The effect on the other boys and the teachers who ran over to help me was enormous.”

Satirical Composition (“The Dance” by Matisse)

1923

Gouache on cardboard, 138 × 105 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

The ability to attract the attention of the others, and to be subsequently admired by them afforded the little king Salvador untold enjoyment. However, he did prefer it when his “entourage” kept their distance. From his window in the laundry-room atelier he spied on the other children, particularly the schoolgirls from the neighboring school.

Cubist Self-Portrait

1923

Gouache and collage on cardboard, 104.9 × 74.2 cm

Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid

In the summer of 1916, the twelve-year-old was sent on holiday to the estate of some family friends, the Pitchots. The “Mulí de la Torre” estate, named after its tower-mill, and just a few kilometers from Figueras, was to become a place of magic for Salvador. For weeks he gave himself up to his day-dreams undisturbed, a reverie for which he only had the odd single hour in Figueras in his laundry-room atelier. Most of his fantasies at this time were of an erotic nature. Eroticism and death become unified very early in Dalí’s life.

Portrait of Ana María

c. 1924

Oil on cardboard, 55 × 75 cm

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

From a net of fantasies centered around eroticism, death, and disgust, Dalí only managed to save himself by his own mental agility. During puberty, and wholly without any system, he began to read through his father’s extensive library. He occupied himself especially with the philosophers Voltaire, Nietzsche, Descartes, and Spinoza; but without doubt his favorite was Kant: “I loved very much to lose myself in the labyrinth of his avenues of thought, in which the ever expanding crystals of my youthful intelligence found true heavenly music reflected.”

Portrait of Luis Buñuel

1924

Oil on canvas, 70 × 60 cm

Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid