Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was the most famous surrealist painter and the one the movement expelled. Born in Figueres in Catalonia in 1904, he was named after an elder brother who had died nine months before his birth, and his parents told him he was that brother's reincarnation — a fact he returned to for the rest of his life. He trained at the Academy in Madrid, where he shared a residence with Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel, and was expelled in 1926 after declaring that nobody there was competent to examine him. With Buñuel he made Un Chien Andalou in 1929, which opens with a razor drawn across an eye, and L'Âge d'Or the following year. He joined the Paris surrealists in 1929 and developed what he called the paranoiac-critical method — inducing a self-provoked delusional state to generate double images and irrational associations while retaining full technical control. His technique was deliberately academic, painted with fine brushes in a hallucinatory clarity that makes the impossible content harder to dismiss. The Persistence of Memory of 1931, with its soft watches, was painted in a few hours. He met Gala, then married to the poet Paul Éluard, in 1929; she became his wife, model and business manager. André Breton expelled him from the movement in 1934 over his refusal to condemn Hitler and his commercial appetite, and coined the anagram Avida Dollars for him. He supported Franco, returned to Catholicism, and spent the postwar decades on large religious and scientific canvases, advertising and self-promotion. He died in Figueres in 1989.

• Lived: 1904 CE – 1989 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: painter