Salvador Dalí's gift for self-publicity
made him the first art superstar
of the television age.
Regarded by some of
his peers as a sell-out,
who didn't toe the line politically,
he first made his name with art
that mined his deepest fears and fixations.
These Surrealist paintings owed much
to the theories of psychoanalysis,
but there's more to Dalí than these
skillfully rendered fever dreams
of sex and decay.
He painted one of the 20th century's
great Crucifixions, but it's more about
physics than religion,
and he was as influenced by philosophy
as he was by Sigmund Freud.
He strove to depict the unseen,
from the movement of atoms
to the concept of a fourth dimension.
It was one of the many interests
he shared with his friend,
Marcel Duchamp.
Dalí once said he would never really die.
It's the sort of grandiose statement
he was famous for,
but it has a ring of truth,
for his enduring fame
and his impact on popular culture
has given him a kind of immortality.
