Salvador Dalí was one of the most famous painters of the 20th century. The Surrealist’s self-promotional antics and bizarre artwork made him an international celebrity early in his career, and there are still traces of him littered throughout pop culture. References to the melting clocks in his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, have cropped up on everything from The Simpsons to news coverage of the 2015 New England Patriots scandal Deflategate. His distinctive personal style is now so iconic that he has become a Halloween costume—one instantly recognizable by mustache alone.
The artist’s long career was full of unexpected twists, and even if you've seen his work, you probably don’t know how far-reaching his influence remains today, long after his 1989 death. Here are 23 facts you should know about him.
1. HE STARTED PAINTING EARLY.
Dalí painted one of his earliest known works, Landscape of Figueres, in 1910, when was about 6 years old. The oil-on-postcard work depicts a scene in his Catalonia hometown, and now hangs in the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. He also found success relatively early—he created his most iconic work, The Persistence of Memory, when he was just 27.
2. HE WAS NOT A GOOD STUDENT.
Even from a young age, Dalí bristled at the confines of traditional schooling. He was bright but easily distracted, and more interested in doodling than studying. He began his education at age 4 at a local public school in his hometown of Figueres, but only two years later, his father transferred him to a French-speaking private school, “due to that first option having failed,” as the Dalí Foundation tactfully describes it. At his secondary school, he embraced his love of public attention by throwing himself down stairs in front of his classmates and teachers, as he wrote in his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
When he graduated, his father insisted that he go to the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, on the grounds that if he had to be a painter, he should at least be qualified to teach. He would be expelled from the school not once, but twice. His first expulsion in 1923 was over his role in student protests involving painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, who students felt had been unfairly denied a professorship in the painting department. However, Dalí returned to school the next year, only to face expulsion again in 1926. He explains in his autobiography that it was because he refused to submit to an oral exam, telling them, “I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well.” This marked the final straw for his academic career.
3. HE MADE HIMSELF HALLUCINATE.
Dalí pioneered what he called the “Paranoiac-Critical” method, designed to help him access his subconscious. He described it as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative association of the phenomena of delirium.” One of the ways he would access this delirious state without drugs or alcohol was to stare at a fixed object and try to see something different within it—much like you might see a shape in the clouds, as the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia explains it [PDF]. Or, he would try to keep himself between sleep and wakefulness, napping with a spoon in his hand and a mixing bowl in his lap. When he fell asleep, the spoon would fall into the bowl, and he would wake up. He would continue to do this in order to keep himself in a semi-conscious, dreamlike state, according to Dalí scholar Bernard Ewell.
4. HE WAS OBSESSED WITH FREUD.
The Surrealist movement was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, whose work was just beginning to be translated into French for the first time when the movement emerged in Paris in 1924. Dalí began reading Freud as a young man at art school in Madrid, and the psychoanalyst’s ideas about dreams and the subconscious had a profound impact on his work. “The book presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries of my life,” he wrote about reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
The feeling wasn’t exactly mutual at first. Freud considered the Surrealists "complete fools” and had little interest in avant garde art. But Dalí was determined to meet Freud. “My three voyages to Vienna were exactly like three drops of water which lacked the reflections to make them glitter,” the artist wrote in his autobiography. “On each of these voyages I did exactly the same things: in the morning I went to see the Vermeer in the Czernin Collection, and in the afternoon I did not go to visit Freud because I invariably learned he was out of town for reasons of health.” (Emphasis in the original.) Finally, Dalí set up an appointment to meet with the 82-year-old Freud in London in the summer of 1938. Dalí recounts that “we spoke little, but we devoured each other with our eyes.” This may have been less romantic than Dalí frames it; Freud had mouth cancer, and an artificial palate made it difficult for him to speak.
Nevertheless, Dalí showed Freud his painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the first painting he made entirely using his paranoiac critical method, as well as an article he wrote on paranoia. The psychoanalyst later wrote to Stefan Zweig, who arranged the meeting, that Dalí was an “undoubtedly perfect technical master” who forced him to reconsider his opinion of Surrealists.
5. THE SURREALISTS DIDN’T WANT HIM.
While Dalí is considered a Surrealist, his fellow Surrealists, many of them communists, tried to expel him from their movement early in his career over his fascist sympathies. In 1934, the “father of Surrealism,” the writer André Breton, called members of the movement to his apartment in Paris. His order against the painter read: “Dalí having been found guilty on several occasions of counterrevolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose that he be excluded from surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.”
Breton and his supporters were offended by Dalí’s depiction of Lenin in his 1933 work The Enigma of William Tell, as well as by the fascination he expressed for Hitler, who he later said “turned him on.” Furthermore, he had painted a swastika on the armband of the nurse in his painting The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, a detail his fellow Surrealists forced him to paint over.
The incident didn’t mark the end of Dalí’s dalliances with fascism. He later became a supporter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, meeting with the general twice at his palace in Madrid, including to personally deliver a portrait of Franco’s niece.
