The new issue of my favorite magazine Smithsonian has a thorough biographical feature on Salvador Dalí. The article is pegged on a huge internationally-touring exhibit now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrating Dalí's 100th birthday last year. From the article:
"The true painter," artist Salvador Dalí once said, "must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas." Born in 1904 in the province of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. His love of sensation and flair for publicity quickly made him, in one scholar's words, "Surrealism's most exotic and prominent figure." Diffidence was not in his vocabulary. "Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing," he said in 1960, "but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time"…
"The only difference between a madman and myself," he once wrote, "is that I am not mad!"
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