10 things about Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904 to parents Salvador Dalí Cusi, a notary and an atheist, and Felipa Domènech Ferres, a devout Catholic.

Dalí’s earliest work, a landscape (no melting pocket watches), was painted in 1914.

In the 1920s, Dalí lost his mother to breast cancer.

After being admitted to the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid, Dalí was expelled after he refused to be tested in art theory and declared his professors incompetent to examine him.

Among his first activities: creating the film “Un Chien Andalou” (“An Andalusian Dog”) with filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Dalí married Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, better known as Gala, in 1936, the same year that Dalí dressed in a diving suit to deliver a lecture at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London.

Dalí and his wife spent the better part of World War II in exile in the United States.

To promote his 1962 book, “The World of Salvador Dalí,” he signed books while in a bed with machines monitoring his brain waves and blood pressure.

In the mid-’40s, Dalí flirted with Hollywood, working on a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 “Spellbound” and an aborted animated short, “Destino” (eventually finished in 2003) with Walt Disney.

The two museums with the richest Dalí collections are those devoted entirely to the life and career of the artist:

The Dalí Museum Collection in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his hometown, Figueres, in Catalonia, Spain.