Salvador Dalí — Madness, Ego, and Surrealism

Salvador Dalí, born in 1904, entered a world already haunted by a ghost: his own. He was named Salvador, after an older brother who had died just nine months before his birth. When he was five, his parents took him to his brother's grave and told him he was the dead child’s reincarnation. A photograph of the first Salvador hung in their bedroom, a constant, spectral presence. To prove he was the living child, and not a mere replacement, Dalí adopted increasingly eccentric and flamboyant behavior. This deep-seated need to assert his unique identity would fuel his entire artistic life and public persona. The theme of this ‘dead brother’ would even appear decades later, in his 1963 work, Portrait of My Dead Brother.