50 Fun Facts About Salvador Dalí

In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?

Figueres: as a teenager he showed early pictures in the town's theatre, and he later rebuilt its burnt-out shell as his own museum, where he now lies buried beneath the stage.

Dalí said his parents took him, aged five, to a grave and called him whose reincarnation?

His older brother: the first Salvador had died nine months before the painter was born, and Dalí wrote that the two resembled each other 'like two drops of water'.

Which Spanish TV series dresses its gang in red jumpsuits and masks of Dalí's face?

Money Heist: creator Álex Pina said Dalí's face was chosen because it was the most iconic image Spain could offer and was almost pop culture already.

Which actor plays Dalí in the 2011 time-travel comedy Midnight in Paris?

Adrien Brody: when the film's time-travelling hero admits that he comes from the future, Dalí and his friends Man Ray and Luis Buñuel see nothing odd in it at all.

After Dalí's mother died in 1921, whom did his father marry?

Her sister: Dalí, who called his mother's death 'the greatest blow I had experienced in my life', respected the aunt who became his stepmother, even as the rows with his father grew.

At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, Dalí became close friends with Luis Buñuel and which poet?

Federico García Lorca: the poet wrote an 'Ode to Salvador Dalí', and Dalí designed the sets when Lorca's play Mariana Pineda opened in 1927.

Which Madrid museum did the student Dalí visit every Sunday, calling it the world's best museum of old paintings?

The Prado: he spent his Sunday mornings there 'pencil in hand', analysing the masterpieces one by one in what he called a monk-like period of solitary work.

When Dalí's body was exhumed in 2017, his moustache was intact, its tips still pointing to which clock time?

Ten past ten: Narcís Bardalet, who had embalmed the painter in 1989 and came back for the exhumation 28 years later, called the upturned tips 'a miracle'.

What happened after Dalí told his 1926 examiners in Madrid that none of them was fit to judge him?

He was expelled: it was the second time the academy had thrown him out, after an earlier suspension on suspicion of stirring up a student protest.

On his first trip to Paris in April 1926, Dalí met which artist he revered?

Pablo Picasso: the 21-year-old called on his idol at his studio, and the canvases he painted over the next few years show the older Spaniard's influence.

Dalí's flamboyant later moustache was modelled on that of which 17th-century painter?

Diego Velázquez: the old master's pictures made the strongest impression on the student Dalí in Madrid, and he went on measuring himself against him for the rest of his life.

Dalí's main contribution to Un Chien Andalou (1929) was what?

Helping Buñuel write the script: the two friends from student days in Madrid packed the film with dream images, from a razor drawn across an eye to grand pianos laden with dead donkeys.

When Dalí met Gala in 1929 she was married to which Surrealist poet?

Paul Éluard: the poet brought Gala to Cadaqués that summer, and when he and the other guests went home she stayed behind with Dalí.

What final straw made Dalí's father throw him out of the family home in 1929?

A drawing insulting his mother: eight years after her death he wrote across an outline of the Sacred Heart that he sometimes spat on her portrait for pleasure, and his enraged father banished him.

After the break with his father, Dalí and Gala made their home in a fisherman's hut where?

Port Lligat: the hut stood on a bay beside Cadaqués, and over the decades he bought its neighbours and joined them into the rambling house that is now a museum.

Dalí said the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory came to him while contemplating what?

Camembert cheese: he called the limp dials 'the camembert of time', brushing aside the art historians who saw the theory of relativity in them.

In The Persistence of Memory, the one watch that isn't melting is swarming with what?

Ants: they cover the orange pocket watch at the lower left, the only one still hard, because Dalí used them as a sign of decay, as if metal could rot like flesh.

Dalí wrote that at six he wanted to be a cook, and at seven which historical figure?

Napoleon: 'and my ambition has been growing steadily ever since', he added in his 1942 autobiography, a boast he spent the rest of his career living up to.

Heiress Caresse Crosby, who threw Dalí a fancy-dress ball in New York, is credited with inventing what?

The brassiere: she patented it in 1914 under her maiden name, Mary Phelps Jacob, and decades later Dalí wrote much of his autobiography as a guest at her Virginia mansion.

In Philippe Halsman's 1948 photograph Dalí Atomicus, which animals fly through the air beside the leaping painter?

Cats: assistants threw three of them and a bucket of water across the studio on the photographer's count, and it took more than two dozen takes before Halsman was satisfied.

Dalí delivered his lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition wearing what?

A deep-sea diving suit and helmet: he began to suffocate inside it, and the young poet David Gascoyne had to free him with a spanner.

In December 1936, Dalí's face appeared on the cover of which American magazine?

Time: he was 32, and the cover came as his paintings hung in the Museum of Modern Art's big New York survey of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.

Dalí's Lips Sofa for the English patron Edward James was modelled on the mouth of which Hollywood star?

Mae West: Dalí had already painted her face as a Surrealist apartment, and James, the collector who supported him for two years, had the lips built as a real sofa.

Stefan Zweig introduced Dalí to which hero of his in London in 1938?

Sigmund Freud: the 82-year-old whispered 'That boy looks like a fanatic', to Dalí's delight, and told Zweig next day that the young Spaniard had changed his view of the Surrealists.

Dalí spent autumn 1938 painting at 'La Pausa', the Riviera home of which fashion designer?

Coco Chanel: his hostess became a collaborator the next year, when she worked with him on the costumes for his ballet Bacchanale.

Live models at Dalí's Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair wore 'costumes' made of what?

Fresh seafood: the pavilion stood among the fair's amusements, and the fashion photographer Horst P. Horst was brought in to record the models in costume.

André Breton's mocking nickname for Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of wordplay?

An anagram of Salvador Dalí: Breton meant it as a jibe at his money-making, but Dalí cheerfully admitted to a 'pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash'.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the consul who defied orders to issue the Dalís' escape visas in Bordeaux in 1940, served which country?

Portugal: Sousa Mendes signed thousands of visas against his government's orders, was recalled and forced into retirement, and was later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.

Which writer published a scathing review of Dalí's 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí?

George Orwell: he granted that 'Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being', and insisted that a reader should hold both facts in mind at once.

Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?

Spellbound: producer David O. Selznick found the sequence too long and complicated, so most of what was shot was cut and only about two minutes survive in the film.

Dalí's film Destino, begun in the 1940s and finished in 2003, was made with which studio?

Disney: the sketches lay in the studio's archive until Walt's nephew Roy came across them in 1999 while making Fantasia 2000 and revived the project.

Dalí showed a study for his first Madonna painting to which pope in 1949?

Pius XII: the pope gave the small canvas his approval, and nine years later Dalí and Gala, married until then only in a civil ceremony, were wed in church.

What did Dalí call his postwar style mixing Catholic imagery with atomic physics?

Nuclear Mysticism: after the atomic bomb he became obsessed with the atom and began painting Madonnas and classical heads that burst into floating particles.

Dalí claimed which animal's horn grows in a logarithmic spiral, and filled his 1950s paintings with it?

Rhinoceros: Dalí called the horn a sign of divine geometry and of chastity, and in one 1951 painting a Raphael-style head bursts into a swarm of tiny horns.

Which four-dimensional shape did Dalí use in Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)?

The tesseract: Christ floats before its unfolded form, a cross built from cubes, because Dalí wanted to show that science and religion could share one picture.

A museum built around the Dalí collection of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse opened in 1982 in which US state?

Florida: the Morses bought their first Dalí in 1943 and befriended the painter, and four decades later their collection found a permanent home in St. Petersburg.

Dalí's spindly-legged beasts echo Bernini's statue in Rome of which animal carrying an obelisk?

Elephant: Dalí took an emblem of weight and strength and set it on stilt-thin legs with an obelisk still on its back, as in his 1948 painting The Elephants.

Which lollipop brand's daisy-shaped logo did Dalí design in the late 1960s?

Chupa Chups: founder Enric Bernat travelled to see the painter to commission it, and Dalí is said to have sketched the yellow daisy in under an hour.

At a 1962 book signing in Manhattan, Dalí lay in bed hooked up to a machine that recorded what for each buyer?

His brain waves: dressed in a golden robe and attended by a doctor and a nurse, he signed copies while the machine traced a chart that went home with each purchaser.

Dalí sent Harpo Marx a Christmas present of a harp strung with what?

Barbed wire: it had spoons for tuning knobs, and a delighted Harpo sent back a photograph of himself at the harp with his fingers in bandages.

Elsa Schiaparelli commissioned Dalí to design a white dress printed with what?

A lobster: Wallis Simpson posed in the dress for the photographer Cecil Beaton shortly before she married the former King Edward VIII.

Dalí was cast as the Emperor in Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade 1970s film of which science-fiction novel?

Dune: his fee was to be $100,000 an hour, and by Jodorowsky's account the director then cut the Emperor's scenes to a single hour of filming.

Dalí arrived at a 1955 Sorbonne lecture in a Rolls-Royce filled with what?

Cauliflowers: the lecture was on Vermeer's Lacemaker, a painting he also spent seven years trying to turn into a film that was never completed.

What kind of animal was Dalí's pet Babou?

Ocelot: the story goes that when a diner in a Manhattan restaurant took fright, Dalí assured her Babou was an ordinary cat he had 'painted over in an op art design'.

Dalí bought Gala a castle at Púbol and agreed to visit it only under what condition?

With her written permission: she spent her summers there through the 1970s, and he moved in for the first time only after she was buried in its crypt in 1982.

Which Spanish king made Dalí a marquess in 1982?

Juan Carlos I: he created the painter Marquess of Dalí de Púbol, after the village where the widower was then living, and came to his hospital bedside six years later.

Dalí's 1983 painting The Swallow's Tail drew its curves from which theory of sudden change by mathematician René Thom?

Catastrophe theory: the swallowtail is one of Thom's seven basic shapes of abrupt change, and Dalí called his work 'the most beautiful aesthetic theory in the world'.

Dalí was hospitalised with severe burns in August 1984 after what?

A fire in his bedroom: inquiries blamed an electrical fault, by one account a short circuit in the bell he kept ringing for his nurses, and he never lived at Púbol castle again.

From 1965 Dalí is alleged to have sold thousands of sheets of lithograph paper that were blank except for what?

His signature: he may have signed more than 50,000 sheets, and the forgeries later printed on them have left dealers wary of his late prints.

Why was Dalí's body exhumed in July 2017?

To take DNA samples for a paternity suit: the tests showed that the woman who claimed to be his daughter was no relation, and a court later ordered her to pay for the exhumation.