Salvador Dali, most famous surrealist artist - in the 1920s and '30s he made his reputation in Europe and the U.S., influenced by the cubism of Picasso and the psychological theories of Freud.
Breaking with other surrealist artists in the 1940s, Dali's later paintings were more realistic and filled with religious and scientific imagery. Famous for his flamboyant personality as well as his art, he worked in several media, including film: he collaborated with filmmaker Luis Bunuel on Un Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age d'Or (1930) and designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).
Salvador Dali apparently led a perfectly normal childhood, albeit the perfectly normal childhood of a artistic prodigy. He was spoiled and tempermental, but not obviously the raving loon that would emerge in his later life. He began to draw and paint at an early age.
Dali's fascination with Hitler was predictably problematic in pre-World War II America. The artist told a biographer, "I saw Hitler as a masochist obsessed with the idee fixe of starting a war and losing it in heroic style. In a word, he was preparing for one of those actes gratuits which were then highly approved of by our group."
The strife over Hitler eventually led Dali to break with the other Surrealists, who were incongruously conformist among their own peer group. Dali's work progressed on several fronts.
He also began working with the image of melting clocks, which became a recurring theme in works like "The Dream of Venus," and "The Persistence of Memory," his most famous work.
The images were produced using what he called the "paranoiac critical" method, which Dali explained as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations." The paranoiac-critical method was simple. The artist tricks himself into going insane, while somewhere deep within remembering that the reason for the insanity is to create a great work of art. Dali chose to do it the hard way -- by actually going mad, rather than simulating madness through chemical means. "I don't take drugs. I am drugs," he once explained.
By the 1950s, Dali was more of a gadabout than a traditional artist. He appeared on TV game shows such as "What's My Line?" where he engaged in good natured, if somewhat bizarre, banter with his fellow guests. He did commercials for Alka Seltzer and designed hats shaped like lobsters. He designed furniture, took up sculpture, created perfumes, wrote PR copy and even briefly worked as a hairdresser. When he did bother to produce paintings, they were still brilliant. Dali also produced one of the most revered Tarot decks in the history of that medium: 78 fully painted cards which combined dream imagery with kabbalist symbolism.
