Many of the most prominent artists are linked not only to amazing art, but also mental illness. Salvador Dali, a modern surrealist, falls into this description. He was considered an artistic genius by many. His work comes from his life and who he was as a person. He has been the source of not only art scholars, but also psychological studies.
Background
Salvador Dali born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dali y Cusi, was a middle class lawyer and notary. Salvador 's father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which was very different from that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Salvador in his art and early eccentricities. It has been said that young Salvador was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates. Because of his behavior, Dali was subjected to furious acts of cruelty by more dominant students or his father. The elder Salvador wouldn 't tolerate his son 's outbursts or eccentricities, and punished him severely. The relationship between Salvador and his father deteriorated when Salvador was still young, the father, Salvador, competed for his wives attention with the young Salvador. Dali had an older brother, born nine months before him, also named Salvador, who died of gastroenteritis. When Dali was 5 years old his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother 's reincarnation. In the metaphysical prose, Dali recalled, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute." Dali considered his parents naming him after his dead brother “an unconscious crime”. In his memoirs Dali recollects the moment of realization as follows: "For the first time
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