Salvador Dali was a Spanish (Catalan) painter of the Surrealist school.
He was named Salvador for his uncle, who had died just before his birth, and was the son of a notary who was a radical Republican and an atheist, and a mother who was Roman Catholic. He speculated that these circumstances caused him to reflect on his identity and to project his own conflicted inner self into his paintings.
His works feature dream imagery to depict inner landscapes. The Persistence of Memory (1931) is his most famous work. His personal style was influenced by his acquaintance with the surrealists when he visited Paris in 1928. Critics called his approach “hallucinatory realism,” because he changed the shapes of the objects he depicted in his fantastic landscape paintings.
Dali was also known for his flamboyant personality (and his mustache).
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