Salvador Dali
1904-1989 · Spanish (Figueres/Catalonia) · Surrealism
Known for: Surrealist icon who painted melting clocks and cultivated the most flamboyant persona in art
Dali developed the 'paranoiac-critical method' to access subconscious imagery and produced paintings of hallucinatory precision. The Persistence of Memory and its melting clocks became Surrealism's most recognized image.
He was expelled from the Surrealists for fascist sympathies and from art school for declaring no professor qualified to judge him. His marriage to Gala was the central relationship of his life - she was muse, manager, and dominatrix. He starved himself after her death and died alone.
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