Salvador Dali was born in 1904, twenty-two months after his brother’s death, who was also named Salvador Dali. His mother often took Dali to see his dead brother’s grave. Staring down at a tomb marker with his name engraved in stone must have had a deep effect on the young child. Throughout his life, Dali was in turn afraid of and fascinated by death. He said, “The two most important motors that make the artistic and superfine brain of Salvador Dali function are, first, libido or the sexual instinct, and, second, the anguish of death. Not a single minute of life passes without the sublime Catholic, apostolic, and Roman specter of death accompanying me even in the least important of my most subtle and capricious fantasies.”

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A consummate draughtsman and painter, often painting eighteen hours a day, Dali’s work certainly exemplifies these two states of mind. He was driven to explore his subconscious, often saying he painted in the hypnogogic state, the ten to fifteen minutes before falling asleep. He believed that he then could access the images of the subconscious without a filter. And because death was so often on his mind, he often painted the symbols of death—a fly for the transience of life, ants symbolizing........

© Observer