Salvador Dalí, born in Figueres, Spain, was one of the twentieth century’s most important painters. He showed artistic talent from an early age, and his parents were determined to nurture that gift. Enrolled in three different art schools, Dalí proved himself a brilliant and technically precise painter as well as an impossible student. He was expelled twice and made a point of telling his examiners they were incompetent to judge him. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of brash artist the modern world was waiting for.

Deeply influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Dalí became the most famous Surrealist of his generation by producing paintings that depicted his dreams, fears, and obsessions. His personal life was no less vivid. He struggled with his sexuality throughout his life, and his relationship with his wife and muse Gala was by turns devoted, turbulent, and utterly unlike anything in conventional experience. She managed him, protected him, exploited him, and was the one person he could not live without.

Fame suited Dalí perfectly, and unlike many well-known artists of his time, he became extremely wealthy. When he and Gala moved to America during World War II, he embraced celebrity with the same theatrical flair he brought to everything else. In his later years, however, he turned away from Surrealism toward a more classical and spiritual style. When he died in 1989, he was buried in the museum he had built for himself in the town where he was born—the most Dalínian ending imaginable.