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Roughly speaking, during the late '30s, through the '40s, '50s, and into the early '60s, Salvador Dalí, with the possible exception of Picasso, was the most talked about, if not the most famous, artist in this country. He was the medias darling and a household name. From his ridiculous theatrical moustache, his deliberately nonsensical ramblings, many of which were televised nationally, to his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, with its image of melting watches, everybody knew the name, if not the face, of Salvador Dalí.
But the decades moved faster than Dalí could run, which is saying plenty about a man who worked 14 to 16 hours a day well into his 70s. And, as history would have it, the artist was soon overtaken, though not outdistanced, by more flavorful brands of performing photographic phenomena. In particular, Jackson Pollock and his gang, followed by the pop artists and Andy Warhol, the last of the really big-time artist entertainers.
What few people knew and most are still not aware of is that Dalí, who publicly courted insanity at every turn, on the very deepest level, as experienced most notably in his writings and lectures, was an original and serious thinker.
While he introduced Surrealism into this country, much as T. H. Huxley proselytized the theories of Darwin until they were accepted, he also helped drive the last nail into its coffin by turning what was a serious art movement into one of pure Dalí-centered entertainment.
Always autobiographical, topical and often at the head of the pack, there are few subjects, from the ideas of Freud, sexology, Catholicism, to the atomic bomb, quantum physics, holograms, cybernetics and DNA, that the artist didn't explore in both his life and work. He liked to think of himself as a man of science and art. While the general consensus is that Dalí's very best work was created between the years 1927 to 1940, the artist, as a recent retrospective held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art made perfectly clear, went on creating in every medium until his mind left him in his late 70s, sometime around 1981.
What makes Dalí unique is that no serious artist, not Picasso, Francis Bacon, or even Andy Warhol, (our American Dalí,...