Salvador Dali is a Spanish painter who in the twentieth century became one of the brightest representatives of surrealism. His paintings, filled with allusions and similar to dreams, are kept today in the best museums in the world and in private collections.
Like most geniuses, as a child, Dali was considered an "uncontrollable" child. At school, he was an outcast, the subject of peer bullying, and at the San Fernando Academy, on the contrary, was considered a boor and a snob. For his too free manner of communication with the professors of the Academy, the hot-tempered Spaniard was expelled from the educational institution. However, paradoxically, it did him good: in search of new impressions, Salvador Dali ended up in Paris, where he found senior companions in painting and a woman who became the only passion of his life.
Most of Dali's paintings were created thanks to his wife, the ambitious Gala. She perfectly understood that she had married a genius, and felt the responsibility entrusted to her: she found buyers for his works, persuaded him not to give up painting. Some of the most loyal admirers of El Salvador's work were Albert and Eleanor Morse, spouses from the United States of America. For forty years of business and friendly relations with Dali and Gala, they have collected about a hundred oil paintings and the same number of watercolors of the great surrealist in a private collection. Today, all these works can be viewed at the Dali Museum, opened since 1984 in the American city of St. Petersburg, Florida.
The European collection of paintings by Salvador Dali is located in Paris, Montmartre, at 11 rue Poulbot. Here visitors can see not only paintings, but also sculptures and engravings by the master. The Moscow Museum of Modern Art also houses several sculptures, and the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts contains etchings, but Dali's paintings are not on permanent Russian exhibitions.
The Reina Sofia Center for the Arts in Madrid, located at Calle Santa Isabel, 52, has in its permanent collection some of the most famous paintings of its genius fellow countryman. Here is the "Portrait of Luis Bunuel" in 1924, and "The Great Masturbator" in 1929, and many of his other works.
However, those cult paintings that, without exaggeration, have seen anyone who is even a little familiar with contemporary art, are, oddly enough, not in the master's homeland, but in two North American cities. The "Persistence of Memory", in the plot of which "fused" clocks are used, adorns the New York Museum of Modern Art. And the controversial "Last Supper" - the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Eccentric in life, Dali decided to arrange his death not as it should be. According to his will, the burial of the artist in his native Spanish city of Figueres is made in such a way that visitors to the Dali Theater-Museum, where the coffin is located, can see him. By the way, Dali designed his last refuge on his own.
