Salvador Dalí: A Genius in Clown's Clothing
"If you want to interest, you have to provoke!", Salvador Dalí once said - and he stuck to it pretty strictly throughout his career. During his exams, he was thrown out of the art academy in Madrid because he declared the examining board "incompetent", he messed with his Surrealist colleagues ("The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist."), he gave an interview in a diving suit and threw himself down a flight of stairs just to feel the pain - and the pomade for his famous moustache is said to have consisted of wax, paint and excrement from his tame ocelot.
Whether the countless anecdotes about him are all true or not, Dalí loved self-dramatization and playing with the media. His eccentric appearance provoked a lot of criticism, which never harmed his popularity. To this day, the public is fascinated by the somnambulistic, psychedelic imagery in his works and by his tightrope act between show and madness: "It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself."
