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Dali first came into contact with the world of painting through an impressionist artist friend of his father. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and his early works are simultaneously bearers of formal innovation and of traditionally academic features. Dali held his first one-man show in Barcelona at the Dalmau Gallery in 1925 and, as from 1928, his adherence to the Surrealist movement began. He was officially accepted as a member of the movement in 1929 through the piece, Dismal Sport. He took part in numerous exhibitions and published various articles in periodicals of the time. His first theoretical contribution to the Surrealist movement was called the "paranoiac-critical method", proposed as a means of destabilising the world, in the belief that everything the observer sees could be something else entirely. This was a positive form of automatism through which he intended to portray invisible objects instead of the images subconsciously associated with them. He contributed to the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries in London, 1936, and at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1938. During the 30s, his indifference to politics alienated him from the other Surrealists and, in 1937, he painted a series of paintings "celebrating" Adolph Hitler which was considered an act of extremely bad taste and led to his being expelled from the Surrealist movement. During the Second World War, he was in the United States where he became a fashionable artist, demanding the return to Classical Art, and where he received tremendous public recognition. In 1948, he returned to Europe and effectively cut himself off from Surrealism. Although different, his work continued to focus on his desire, on one hand, to follow the teachings of the old masters and, on the other, to introduce new visual experiences. Optical illusion, photographic realism, divisionism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art are all to be found in his later work. Dali was buried in the Teatre-Museu Dali in Figueres, founded in 1974, which is not only the repository of a large part of his work but is also a theatrical monument to his ideas and personality.

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