Salvador Dalí

A watch hangs over a branch and runs. The Persistence of Memory is barely thirty-three centimetres wide and became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. Dalí rendered what he saw in dreams with photographic precision, composing through what he called the paranoiac-critical method so that one form could be read as another. The technique is classical; the content is the unconscious. He worked on the film Un Chien Andalou, designed the dream sequence for Hitchcock, and took on advertising and jewellery. He was as known for the self-performance as for the paintings. He died in his home town of Figueres in 1989.