Legend has it Dalí dreamed up his famous "soft watches" while watching a wheel of Camembert melt in the sun.
Legend has it that the image behind art history's most recognizable clocks, the soft, melting dials of "The Persistence of Memory," came to Salvador Dalí from a wheel of Camembert that had started to run across his lunch plate in the heat. Whether that's true or a fine story the artist told about himself is hard to say: Dalí was never especially concerned with the line between fact and invention.
He studied at Madrid's San Fernando Academy, from which he was eventually expelled, much like Shemyakin, on the other side of the ocean and decades later. In the late 1920s Dalí joined the Paris Surrealists and developed the "paranoiac-critical method," a technique of deliberately inducing controlled hallucinations in himself and then transferring them to canvas. That's how his signature imagery emerged: long-legged elephants, stretching Empordà landscapes, double images where a single outline reads as one thing and then as something else entirely.
In his lifetime Dalí managed something few artists attempt: building his own museum. He set the Theatre-Museum in Figueres inside the ruins of the city theater, destroyed during the Civil War, and built it not as a storage space for his work but as another work in its own right. Beyond painting, Dalí worked extensively in printmaking, illustrating Dante, the Bible and Don Quixote. The foundation's collection holds six of his works:
- "The Swallow," 1976, etching on Arches paper
- "Oak and Reed," 1976, drypoint on Arches paper
- "Mills," 1970, aquatint on Arches paper
- "Sick Animals," 1976, etching on Arches paper
- "Deer and Its Reflection," 1976, drypoint on Arches paper
- "Angel's Vision," 1977–1984, toned bronze
