Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in Figure, Spain. He was a leader in the new movement of art in the early 20th century called Surrealism. In 1921 he entered the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid where he made friends with Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel, and Eugenio Montes. In June of 1923 Dali was suspended from the Academy for having inciting the students to rebel against the authorities of the school, but was let ba

Salvador Dali's relationship with his family was crucial to the formation of his artistic personality. Childhood and adolescents had remained vividly important to him through out his career as an artist. Memories from this time, real or imaginary, are the grounds by which many of his most popular works were formed. His sister characterized their childhood as "exceptionally rich and harmonious", a point of view rarely expressed by Dali's own accounts. They lived in a house with no front door, where the chairs were mostly made of spoons, and there was a whole room dedicated to sculptures of the female genitalia which might have attributed to his difficulty to achieve an erection and his horror of the female genitalia. In his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, the artist claimed to have been profoundly affected by two traumatic childhood events. The first concerns his father arriving home late form a business trip and dashing past the family to the bathroom with a vulgar announcement, "I've crapped" In the second his father casually traumatizes young Dali by leaving a book containing photographs of venereal disease propped on the family piano. Perhaps this explains the role of the grand pianos, occasionally topped by rotting donkeys in some of his works. It may be these incidents really did shape the future artist, but it is also true that he was an incurable liar and Freud freak. Heavily influenced by Freud's book Interpretation of Dreams. He was awestruck by art's ability to explore subconscious desires and led him to believe that the fact that subconscious impulses often appear extremely cruel to our consciousness is further reason for lovers of truth not to hide them. Only Gala his muse and wife understood his strangeness. She may have been even stranger.

Cafe Cyrano featured an exhibit of Dali's own surrealist paintings. Dali was also fascinated with the writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud. He was so moved by Freud's theory that he subsequently vowed to his life's ambition to Systemize confusion. Dali is best known for his surrealist works. Surrealism is an art style in which imagery is based on fantasy and the world of dreams. It is thought have grown out of the French literary movement in the 19

Leda Atomica is some what connected to The Madonna of Port Lligat, as if Dali is showing a symbolic story of his relationship with Gala, (wife). In the painting of Leda Atomica, Dali shows Leda played by Gala, the mother of semi divine children, whose birth is indicated by the broken eggshell out of which they were hatched. Gala is presented as a mother, and furthermore, with the swan's beak hardly touching her. She seems to represent a kind of miraculous and quiet spiritualized form of impregnation. Gala appears in many of his paintings including The Madonna of Port Lligat, and that she plays a very important role for Dali, not just modeling but yet also some kind of hope and inspiration to Dali himself. He paints the appearance of the swan Zeus to the naked Gala, as an annunciation scene, the winged carrier of the women's destiny whispers her future in her ear, a memory perhaps of the legend that the conception of Jesus in the Virgin Mary was achieved by the introduction to her ear of the breath of the Holy Ghost.

One of Dali's earliest diary entries stated " I am madly in love with myself." That love affair lasted throughout most of his life, resulting in lonely solitude. I believe that this lack of human intervention enabled Dali to use his fears as motivation, making his deepest most personal thoughts more easily expressed. In Dali's painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1934) the artist refers to the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, in which a young man fell deeply in love with his own reflection and was transformed onto a beautiful flower. Similarly in Dali's painting what at first looks like the body of a man can, seen another way, become an image of a hand holding an egg, sprouting a Narcissus f

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