Dali House

“Self-portrait with the Neck of Raphael” may have been among the eight works Dali showed in January 1922 as part of a Catalan Students Association group exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries on Barcelona’s Carrer de la Portaferrisa. Below are two other self-portraits also from 1921. Josep Dalmau opened the gallery in 1912, soon after hosted an exhibition of cubist art and even showed Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “Nude Descending a Staircase”.

Dali was ascending with his art, but in October 1923 was suspended from the academy for a year when he fomented a student rebellion against the appointment of a “mediocre” professor of painting. During his downtime Dali returned to Figueres and, with a press purchased for him by his father, learned to make prints. His father also got him thrown in prison: Dali Senior’s political activities resulted in his apolitical son’s arrest, by way of reprisal, and Salvador spent 30 days in a Girona jail. His “criminal record” only came to light in 2004 when the prison archivists were doing some housecleaning.

In November 1925 Dalmau gave Dali his first solo exhibition and Picasso came to see it, and left full of praise.

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.