Art by Salvador Dalí

Dalí's mustache was practically a second signature: waxed into thin upward points, styled after the 17th-century painter Velázquez, and deployed constantly for photographers because Dalí, more than almost any other 20th-century painter, understood that being famous was itself a kind of ongoing performance. The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its melting pocket watches draped over a barren landscape, took him barely more than a day to paint and became one of the most reproduced images in art history almost immediately.

He developed what he called the "paranoiac-critical method," deliberately inducing something close to a self-controlled hallucinatory state to generate imagery, treating his own mind's tendency to see faces and figures in random shapes as a tool rather than a distraction. His collaboration with Luis Buñuel on the 1929 film Un Chien Andalou opens with a still-shocking image of an eyeball being sliced open, meant, in Dalí's own account, to jolt an audience out of ordinary logical thinking before anything else in the film even happens.

His wife and manager, Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, appears throughout his later work and by most accounts ran his business affairs while he focused on spectacle, a dynamic André Breton mocked when he expelled Dalí from the official Surrealist group in the late 1930s, coining the anagram "Avida Dollars" to accuse him of selling out. Dalí, characteristically, seemed to take it as a compliment. He designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo in 1969, on a napkin, in under an hour, and it hasn't changed since.