In 1931 a Catalan painter named Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory, a small canvas of melting clocks, and those clocks made him one of the best known Surrealists, the artists who set out to paint the logic of dreams.
Born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904, he died there in 1989, and in between he turned his own life into a public performance, with an upturned moustache as its signature.
His own explanation of the painting that made his name was a joke, and the landscape behind it was real.
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The Persistence of Memory measures only 24 by 33 centimeters, about 9.5 by 13 inches, barely more than a foot wide. It sold for a few hundred dollars, and since 1934 it has belonged to New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Visitors often take it for a picture about time. When the physicist Ilya Prigogine asked whether the soft watches had to do with Einstein's theory of relativity, the painter answered that they were Camembert, a French cheese, left to melt in the sun.
The setting is his own coast. The rocks in the right corner are those of Cap de Creus, a headland jutting into the Mediterranean near Cadaqués, the Catalan fishing village where Dalí spent his boyhood summers.
On the sand at the center lies a pale, fleshy face in profile, its single eye closed under long lashes, as if asleep. It is a distorted portrait of the painter himself.
A brother who died before him
In the house where Dalí was born, even his first name was not entirely his own. Salvador had already been given to another boy in the family before him.
What You'll Discover
Who the first Salvador was.
Why Madrid threw him out.
Whose permission he needed.
Why Breton put him on trial.
Why he lectured underwater.
What was found in his grave.