The Spanish surrealist's life and art in 183 placemarks

"My life," Salvador Dali once said to the moans of his many detractors, "is one tragical sequence of exhibitionism." There is a lot to dislike about Dali. He was a male chauvinist, ridiculed his friends' needs, kowtowed to fascists, was bizarrely aberrant in sexual matters, admitted to "a pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash" that ultimately almost wrecked the market for his own art, and he built a fortress of appalling megalomania around his fundamental absence of self-esteem.

"I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and ended up being one," he said, and on another occasion: "When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault."

In a 1994 article for Time, the influential art critic Robert Hughes lamented that Dali had long before his death "collapsed into wretched exhibitionism" and dimissed him as "an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s". But the thing is, he was a genius, and his art was often miraculous, throughout his life. Even one of his most severe critics, George Orwell, acknowledged that, "He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud." Dali was certainly confounding, and often deliberately so. The goal of his art, he said, was to "systematise confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality".

He created thousands of paintings, drawings and prints and dozens of sculptures, designed stage sets and costumes for the ballet and the theatre, illustrated books, made films, explored emerging technology, concocted commercial advertising and came out with clothing, jewellery and perfume. Only a handful of his creations were trite; a few were surely self-serving. The rest remain compelling, forceful, mentally provocative and even spiritually nurturing.

And he did all of this with a profound understanding of celebrity, anticipating Warhol by decades, not to mention performance art. "Dali took it as his fundamental intellectual responsibility to irritate and transgress, exuberantly and unrepentantly," art historian Charles Stuckey wrote in Art in America. He did so convinced that mankind had reached a dangerous precipice. "Our epoch is dying of moral skepticism and spiritual nothingness," he lamented in his autobiography, "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali".

In the conflagration of Hiroshima, however, Dali recognised the promise of a new beginning. The atom's division set him on a new course between the science of spinning molecules and the serenity he found in the Catholic faith of his forebears that produced some of his most timeless work.

PLEASE NOTE:
* The copyright to virtually all Dali images is owned by the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, based at the museum in his hometown of Figueras, Spain. I hope they don't mind.
* The tour is almost completely chronological, though there are some jags in the timeline where geographical proximity takes precedence.
* Many of the placemark balloons are presented as text-inclusive Jpeg images. These can be right-clicked and downloaded, of course, but anyone wishing a text-only version of the tour can have one for the asking. The whole thing has been reproduced on my art blog.
* I have reluctantly abandoned the use of linguistic accents in this biography because often the Google Earth interface jumbles the text where they appear. French, Spanish and Catalan terms suffer as a result, but English clarity is ensured.
* A big thanks to whoever at Google Earth got us some high-res imagery of Spain's Catalonia region just in time for me to pull this project together!
* And a thankyou in advance to anyone who offers amendments, corrections and constructive criticism.

EDITED FEBRUARY 2008: Missing evidence means the case for Dali attending the surrealist exhibition at the Guildhall Gloucester in England has been thrown out.
EDITED APRIL 2008: Thanks to LuciaM for pointing that that Sigmund Freud's London house at 39 Elsworth Road, where Dali visited him, is not the London Freud Museum, as I'd stated. The museum is at 20 Maresfield Road, where Freud moved the following month and where he died.

FURTHER READING, IMAGE SOURCES AND SOME FUN:
Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation
The Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida
A World History of Art has Descharnes-Neret biography online, illustrated
Salvador Dali Art Gallery: top-notch collection of images with commentaries
Ben Rubeck's excellent Virtual Dali site, packed with art and information
Martynas' comprehensive look at the man and his art
Dali at Olga's Gallery
Artsmode Network's Salvador Dali Visions has many articles
George Bailey's image-packed Tripod site
Many unsorted images at the Virtual Gallery of Art
Many links at Artcyclopedia
Photos of Dali
The other surrealists
All the Dali prints
Decent commentaries on many Dali paintings with wallpaper links at this site, part of the online series "A World History of Art"
A fun surrealist site
Exquisite Corpse
Surrealist insult generator