1. He believed he was the reincarnation of his dead brother.
Perhaps the most unusual fact about Dali is that before Dali was born, his mother had given birth to another child, also called Salvador Dali.
Unfortunately, the first Salvador died and nine months later, the second Salvador Dali was born. Since the second Salvador heavily resembled the first and had been born nine months later, his parents believed that their dead child reborn.
When Dali was five, his parents took him to the first Salvador’s grave and informed him of their belief that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother.
Dali also believed that was true…
2. Dali was a very “bad boy”.
In 1923, he was suspended from the academy, where he had been educated for a while. He was arrested the same year and remained in prison for a while. In 1926, he was dismissed from the academy was exported just before the final exams.
3. Dali was a Catalan but he explained his support to General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Despite being an apolitical person, this attitude led to a separation with other surrealist artists whose majority consisted of Marxists.
4. Another thing that bothered some people was his obsession with Hitler. In some of his paintings, Hitler was involved in some way.
Dali, however, emphasized that his interest in Hitler was not political. We see below Dali’s work titled “The Enigma of Hitler“.
5. Dali made his secretaries “rich”!
Dali was not paying a salary to his secretaries. Instead, he gave some pictures he painted. The pictures that were valued over time made his secretaries a millionaire!
6. Dali was a big fan of the physicist Heisenberg and was very curious about scientific theories and inspired from them artistically.
He wrote:”I, who previously only admired Dali, will now start to admire that Heisenberg who resembles me“.
7. Dali was also a bit of a con man. He justified the enormous price tag on one painting by telling a rich customer that the paint had been mixed with the venom of a million wasps.
8. Dali also had a crafty method to avoid from paying restaurant bills.
He frequently invited large groups of friends out for lunches. When it was time to pay the bill, Dali would write a check for the full amount.
However, he would casually draw a caricature/pattern on the back of the check. These checks, which had drawings, could not be replaced, but Dali’s signature designs made them much more valuable financially.
Sort of a win win situation…
9. Dali had a technique called “Paranoiac-Critical Method.”
This involved trying to create a self-induced paranoid state, allowing him to draw irrational relationships between unconnected objects and to depict the landscape of his own subconscious mind. He was inspired from Freud in the invention of this method.
In fact, this situation went beyond simply being a method for Dali and turned into a lifestyle.
10. The logo of the world’s largest lollipop manufacturer Chupa Chups was drawnby Dali.