Dali House

While a student at the San Fernando Academy, Dali lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, then itself a prestigious cultural institution, an incubator for Spain’s brightest young thinkers, among them Dali’s new friends Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel.

At the same time, he submerged his natural shyness in flamboyance. He dressed as a dandy, with long hair and sideburns and stockings and knee breeches of a sort not seen in a century.

This is a self-portrait from 1921, the sketch above from 1922.

Dali’s mother died of breast cancer in February 1921 (”The greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her.”) and his father married her sister, of whom Salvador was quite fond. His father, seen below in a portrait by his son from that year, enrolled him at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he took his cues from Juan Gris, Georges Seurat and the Italian Metaphysical School and painted his first cubist works.

Here, Dali wrote in his diary in 1918: “I’ll be a genius. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius.” “Self-Portrait in the Studio”, above, was done in 1919.

The original San Fernando Academy opened in 1752; its current facilities were inaugurated in 1986. It exhibits artworks spanning 200 years.