Conscientious and meticulous student,
Salvador Dali studies art painting at the college of art in Madrid. He becomes a friend of Federico Garcia Lorca, reads philosophical books and is interested in the new tendencies of art.
The paintings that he exhibits in 1925 at Dalmau in Barcelona and 1926 in Madrid are already marked by a strangeness. In 1928, he goes to Paris to meet Picasso and the surrealist artists; his name appears for the first time in the last number of "the surrealist Revolution" in 1929. His name will come up also in the six numbers of the "Surrealism to the service of the revolution". He works out a new theory of creation that he calls the paranoiac-critical activity ". He also writes in "Minotaure" some essays in which his original vision appears: he studies at the same time "the obsessing image of Angélus de Millet" and "the terrifying and edible beauty of the architecture modern style".

His painting, done meticulously, surprises by the extravagance of its figures. The retrograde and archaic style of the realisation is compensated by a delirious imagination. These are soft watches running in an unreal landscape, characters with hypertrophied members, flights of flies and visible signs of putrefaction.
In 1937, he goes to Italy and is under the influence of the Italian Renaissance and enters into the way of the classicism. He is disowned by his friends. Thereafter are the acid remarks of Andre Breton:
"In spite of an undeniable ingeniousness, the company of Dali served by a technique ultra-retrograde (return to Meissonier) and discredited by a cynical indifference regarding the way of domination, has given some signs of panic for a long time and has superficially succeeded only by organising itself its popularization. He sinks today in the academism, an academism which, of its only authority, declares itself in favour of the classicism and since 1936 does not interest the surrealism anymore."
Based in the United States during the war, Salvador Dali has a great success there. He creates ballets: Labyrinthe (1941), writes the secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942) and he influences the fashion and Publicity in an appreciated way. He comes back to Europe and he settles down in Cadaquès and he devotes himself to the religious painting: Christ Saint Jean of the Cross (1951), the Cène (1955).

No matter what André Breton said about Dali, he is inseparable from his work and he will remain popular and synonymous with surrealism.