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1922–1926 · Formation

Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando

14 – 27 November 1925

First solo exhibition, at the Galeries Dalmau

Dalí's first solo exhibition, twenty-two works made before his exposure to Surrealism, was held at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona and was a critical and commercial success. Six months earlier, in May, eleven of his works at the Sociedad Ibérica de Artistas group show in Madrid had been praised by leading critics.

April 1926

First trip to Paris: meeting Picasso

In Paris Dalí met Pablo Picasso, whom he revered and who had already heard good reports of him from Joan Miró, who later introduced him to many Surrealists. Over the next few years he made works strongly influenced by Picasso and Miró.

August 1929

Meets Gala

Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Diakonova, a Russian émigrée ten years his senior, then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.

November 1929

First Paris show; joins the Surrealists

Dalí's first Paris exhibition, eleven works at the Goemans Gallery, was a commercial success; André Breton called his new work “the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now”. That year he officially joined the Surrealist group, who hailed what he would call his paranoiac-critical method.

28 December 1929

His father throws him out

His father disapproved of his romance with Gala and his Surrealist friends, and on reading that he had exhibited in Paris a drawing inscribed “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait”, demanded a public recantation. Dalí refused and was thrown out of the family home, told he would be disinherited and must never set foot in Cadaqués again.