Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres, Catalonia, in 1904. He began drawing when he was 12 and was formally educated in fine arts at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. He experimented with Cubism, was attracted to Dada and Futurism, and was influenced by the great masters of the Renaissance. In 1929, he joined the Surrealist movement and became its most successful proponent.
His work shocked and excited society. Diverse things were merged into an explicit rawness, one with unusual meanings that, when combined, made irreality concrete.
In the Paris of the 1930s, Dalí surrounded himself with a circle of friends working in varied disciplines beyond the study of purely pictorial art. He collaborated with designers like JeanMichel Frank to move his imagery into reality. His notebooks were filled with expressive and strange designs. They had the same obsessive and paralysing exactness of detail that is found in his paintings and were intended to be made to surround him.