SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989). El rapto de Europa" ("The Abduction of Europe") , copy 45/150. Etching and aquatint on paper Signed and justified in pencil. Size: 38.5 x 58 cm (print); 55 x 75 cm (paper); 65.5 x 86 cm (frame). Salvador Dalí was one of the greatest exponents of the surrealist movement. His work greatly influenced the direction of Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s, and he is acclaimed as the creator of the paranoiac-critical method, the essential combination of the real and the imaginary. During his early years, Dalí discovered contemporary painting during a family visit to Cadaqués, where he met the family of Ramon Pichot, an artist who travelled regularly to Paris. Following Pichot's advice, Dalí began to study painting with Juan Núñez. In 1922, Dalí stayed at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid to begin studying Fine Arts at the San Fernando Academy. However, before his final exams in 1926, he was expelled for claiming that there was no one there fit to examine him. That same year Dalí travelled to Paris for the first time. There he met Picasso, and established certain formal characteristics that would become distinctive of all his work from then on. During this period Dalí held regular exhibitions in both Barcelona and Paris, and joined the Surrealist group based in the Parisian district of Montparnasse. The painter landed in America in 1934, thanks to the art dealer Julian Levy. Following his first solo exhibition in New York his international reputation was definitively consolidated, and from then on he exhibited his work and gave lectures all over the world. Most of his production is housed in the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueras, followed by the collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg (Florida), the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades (California), the Espace Dalí in Montmartre (Paris) and the Dalí Universe in London.