Salvador Dalí

Most people meet Dalí through the images first — Surrealism, and what has been called the theatre of modern images. He was a painter and sculptor, but also a showman, and the two roles were not separate. The spectacle was part of the work.

He was born in Figueres, in Spain, on 11 May 1904. His training combined strict attention to method with a willingness to pull ideas from different places at once, and the early work is marked less by shock than by clarity — a readiness to question assumptions he had inherited and to restate a problem until it became workable. Travel, correspondence and steady reading built up the equipment. Apprenticeships and collaborations built the craft habits. Patience with small detail sat alongside a feel for the larger shape of the field.

In the middle stretch of his career he tightened his technique and widened the range of what he was willing to take on. Rivals and critics mattered here: the pressure from outside sharpened how he argued and how he presented. Public statements, lectures and demonstrations turned tentative ideas into settled positions. He moved between analysis and construction rather than choosing one, and the failures functioned as tests that improved what came next. Students and interlocutors carried the approach outward, past any single institution.

Later on the emphasis shifted towards putting things in order — notes, editions, reflective essays that fixed the strongest version of the central ideas. The surviving archives show both sides of it: drafts and corrections and abandoned experiments sitting next to finished work. He died on 23 January 1989. Institutions have memorialised him since, and each generation reads him again with different tools, which is perhaps the more accurate measure of what he left behind: not a set of objects, but a method still being used in studios and classrooms.