Salvador Dalí

In the 1930s exhibitions in New York, Paris and London carried Dalí’s name around the world, and he also designed the cover of the December 1936 issue of Time magazine. The “showman” in him drove him to astonishing extremes: at the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 (pictured) he gave a lecture dressed in a diving suit and almost suffocated, because the helmet got so stuck that it could hardly be removed. At his 1938 appearance in Paris he went even further: he arrived at the event in a specially designed taxi from whose roof rainwater dripped onto 300 snails crawling inside the passenger compartment. Dalí worked hard at developing his persona. “It is very hard to shock the world every 24 hours,” he once confessed.

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Dalí was one of the most famous painters of the 20th century. Besides painting, however, he also excelled in many other fields of art, including sculpture, book illustration and jewellery design. He worked with the Spanish director Luis Buñuel on the first Surrealist films — Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’Or (1930) — and designed a famous dream-sequence with some startling images for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Spellbound (1945). Dalí also wrote a book titled Hidden Faces (1944) and a multi-volume colourful autobiography. He has museums in his home town of Figueras in Spain, in St Petersburg and in Florida, and more than 500 of his works can be seen in the permanent exhibition at the County Hall Gallery in London.

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