Dalí grew up to become surrealism's most flamboyant showman, fusing meticulous technical draftsmanship with hallucinatory imagery drawn from dreams, Freudian theory, and his own eccentric psyche. Works like 'The Persistence of Memory' made him one of the 20th century's most recognizable artists, while his waxed mustache and theatrical public persona made him a celebrity far beyond the art world.
Born in the small Catalan town of Figueres, Dalí was named after an older brother who had died nine months before his birth, a fact his parents told him repeatedly and which haunted his sense of identity throughout his life. He later said he felt like a living reincarnation of a ghost.
His training at Madrid's Real Academia was rigorous and classical, and it showed: even his strangest paintings, populated by melting clocks, elongated elephants, and burning giraffes, display an almost photographic precision. He absorbed Cubism, Futurism, and eventually Freud's writings on dreams and the unconscious, which became his central creative engine.
Dalí's genius for self-promotion, from a diving suit lecture to designing for Hitchcock and Disney, blurred the line between artist and celebrity decades before that became commonplace, making him as famous for his persona as for his brush.
Key people: Salvador Dalí