The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,” declared Salvador Dali. Over his long life (1904-89), Dali’s melting clocks and sexualised landscapes exploited to the full his observation that “one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”
Today’s teenagers, especially if they visit the fantastic museum in his home town of Figueras in Catalonia, relish Dali’s lifelong battle aginst the “sterile” forces of good taste. His work - “I am Surrealism” - challenges the proprieties not just through beautifully painted images but also through his writings:
“What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and never seen, to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.”
