In 1931 he painted The Persistence of Memory — soft watches on the rocks of the Costa Brava. The picture is small, hardly bigger than a hand. It hangs now in MoMA in New York, and there is always a queue in front of it.
Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in Figueres, in Catalonia. From childhood: scandals, posturing, strangeness. His father, a notary, did not know what to do with his son. At sixteen Salvador was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he befriended Lorca and Bunuel.
In 1929 he came to Paris and met Gala, the wife of the poet Eluard. Gala left him for Dali and became his muse, his agent, his business manager and his chief reason for living. Some canvases he signed "Gala-Salvador Dali" — two names as one.
He joined the Surrealists — Andre Breton, Magritte, Ernst — but soon fell out with them: too theatrical, too commercial, too far to the right politically. Breton dubbed him "Avida Dollars," an anagram of Salvador Dali.
His method was the "paranoiac-critical": he would deliberately work himself into a state close to hallucination and record the images with a photographer's precision. Elephants on spindly legs, a tiger leaping out of a fish, eggs on plates — all drawn from that inner archive.
His last years he spent in the castle of Pubol, which he had bought for Gala. After her death he scarcely painted at all. He died in 1989 and is buried in the crypt of his own theatre-museum in Figueres — beneath the stage on which he had performed all his life.