Salvador Dalí: 1904—1989: Artist

In the meantime, however, the artist was becoming a star. He visited the United States several times and proved a master of publicity, honored by, among other things, a surrealist-themed dance in which a cow carcass stuffed with a horn-type record player was mounted on the wall at one end of the room. He designed department-store windows in New York and even lent his name to a perfume line. Returning to Europe for a time, Dalí intensified his flamboyant ways, driving through Paris in a cauliflower-covered Rolls-Royce and appearing for a lecture in England dressed in a diving suit and leading two Russian wolfhounds on a leash. "The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad," the artist said once in a widely quoted remark.

Dalí spent much of World War II in the United States, living well off the proceeds of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. The work attracted attention with its portraits of high-society figures, its work with fashion designers including Coco Chanel, and of Dalí's design of the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. With public acclaim, though, came increasing disdain in the art world. Part of that disdain came from Dalí's public success; fellow surrealist André Breton rechristened him with an anagram of his own name, "Avida Dollars."

But Dalí's style itself was growing more and more distant from the abstract modernist art mainstream and changing on its own terms. The artist rededicated himself to Catholicism in the late 1930s, and after the war began to produce canvases that, while they did not renounce surrealist elements, had a grandiose quality that, in the eyes of some observers, tried unsuccessfully to mimic the monumentality of the works of Spain's Old Masters. Dalí moved back to Spain with his wife Gala in 1955. He admitted (as quoted by Maclean's)to a "pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash," and turned out huge quantities of prints of his works. Sometimes he simply signed his name to blank sheets onto which copies would be printed later.