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(b Angra do Heroísmo, Azores, Jan 13, 1914; d Lisbon, December 4, 1990).

Portuguese painter, illustrator and poet. In 1935 he moved to Lisbon where his exhibition in 1940 with António Pedro and the English sculptress Pamela Bowden was considered the first national manifestation of Surrealism. In his melancholy and menacing works of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the dream-like spaces are crowded with people and animals in attitudes of violence or alarm, for example Antithesis of Calm (1940; Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian). The Brazilian painter Cícero Dias, who was in Portugal in the early 1940s, was an important influence on him then. During the 1940s his painting became less crowded, and the overt violence gave way to gestures of greater ambiguity. In 1944 a fire in the studio he shared with António Pedro destroyed many of their paintings.

Until 1947, when he emigrated to Paris, Dacosta participated in various group shows, winning the important Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Award in 1942. He also wrote poetry and illustrated a number of books, such as ...

(Felip Jacint )

(b Figueres, May 11, 1904; d Figueres, Jan 23, 1989).

Spanish Catalan painter, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer and film maker. One of the most prolific artists of the 20th century, his fantastic imagery and flamboyant personality also made him one of the best known. His most significant artistic contribution, however, was through his association with Surrealism.

Dalí was born into the happy, if ideologically confusing, family of a respected notary. His father was a Republican and atheist, his mother a Roman Catholic. He was named Salvador in memory of a recently dead brother. This had a profound effect: his subsequent experimentation with identity and with the projection of his own persona may have developed out of an early understanding of himself as ‘a reply, a double, an absence’ (Dalí, 1970, p. 92). His childhood provided him with the fertile memories, both true and false, that fill his autobiography and resound in his art. Catalonia remained important to Dalí, but for its landscape rather than its separatist politics. He painted for much of his life in a house he bought in Port Lligat, near the family holiday home in Cadaqués, but the radical political beliefs that his father had taught him were to be replaced by a self-conscious monarchism and Catholicism. Dalí’s first contact with painting was through Ramon Pichot (...

(b Mexico City, Aug 26, 1896; d Mexico City, Jan 28, 1971).

Mexican painter, stage designer, illustrator, and writer. He studied in Mexico City at the Escuela al Aire Libre de Coyoacán and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, before living in Paris from 1922 to 1930, where he trained as a stage designer from 1928 to 1930 in the studio of Charles Dullin. In Paris he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and became aware of Surrealism; he was one of the first artists to introduce the style to Mexico. In his characteristic small-scale oil paintings, such as Children with Cage (Mexico City, Mus. N. A.), in which two girls are silhouetted in front of a curtain, he combined neo-Impressionist brushwork and a highly theatrical handling of light with absurd elements. He abandoned his career as a painter at an early age, concentrating in the 1930s and 1940s on designing for the stage as well as making his name as a critic and playwright....

(Artur Manuel Rodrigues do)

(b Lisbon, Dec 3, 1920).

Portuguese painter, draughtsman, illustrator and poet. After a Neo-Realist phase, he joined the dissident group The Surrealists, founded in Lisbon in 1948 by Mário Cesariny. Cruzeiro Seixas participated in the two exhibitions held by this group in 1949 and 1950, with works inspired by the poetry of Lautréamont.

In his paintings and, more especially, drawings, for example La Variété en dehors d’elle-même (1947; Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian), he aimed to create a personal and often erotic imagery in the metamorphosis of human, plant and animal forms. These works seldom transcend the commonplace or contrived. His collages, such as The Basis of Language (1960; artist’s col., see Wohl, 1978 exh. cat., p. 83), resemble those of Max Ernst.

Between 1952 and 1964 he lived in Luanda, where he was a curator in the Museum of Angola. In 1965 he lived in Paris and returned to Portugal in 1966, where he illustrated several books that year: ...

(b Galesburg, IL, Aug 25, 1910; d New York, NY, Jan 31, 2012).

American painter, sculptor, illustrator, stage designer, and writer. She studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1932 before moving to New York, where she saw the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–7; New York, MOMA) and was inspired to become a painter. After meeting Max Ernst in 1942 she became part of the group of exiled Surrealists living in New York during World War II; see Children’s Games (1942) and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943). Her first one-woman exhibition took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1944.

One of Tanning’s first Surrealist paintings was the self-portrait, Birthday (1942; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), influenced by the illusionistic Surrealism of René Magritte and Max Ernst that she had seen at the MOMA exhibition. To support herself in the 1940s, she worked as an advertising illustrator for Macy’s, and some of her paintings express an affinity with the conventions of fashion advertising (see ...