Salvador Dalí
His parents gave him the name of an elder brother who had died nine months before and took him to the grave — Dalí counted this the first fact of his biography. He was expelled from the Madrid academy, joined the surrealist circle in Paris and devised the “paranoiac-critical method”: to paint delirium with the precision of an old master. “The Persistence of Memory”, with its melting clocks, was painted in 1931, when he was twenty-seven. The group expelled him for his political indifference and his love of money — Breton rearranged his name into “Avida Dollars”. Then came America, work with Hitchcock and Disney, jewellery, advertising and the theatre-museum in his native Figueres, where he is buried.
He was born in Figueres on 11 May 1904 at 08:45 Greenwich mean time, which Spain had kept since 1901. The hour is entered on his birth certificate.