Salvador Dalí: 1904—1989: Artist

But the general public never lost its affection for Dalí's works. There was always a market for whatever he produced. Indeed, Dalí collectors in later years have been bedeviled by the large number of fake Dalí prints circulating through the art market—a result, certainly, of Dalí's own lax supervision of the printmaking process, but also of the sheer demand for his work. In later years Dalí painted less, troubled by the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and other ailments. Yet he remained a public figure, attending the construction of a museum devoted to his own works in his hometown of Figueras, and in the 1980s lending his support to a campaign to bring the summer Olympic Games to the Spanish city of Barcelona in 1992.

Dalí died of heart failure on January 23, 1989, and was buried on the grounds of his own museum. As the rigid canons of abstraction have weakened and modern art has become more welcoming to realist and even surrealist elements, there have been signs of an upward trend in Dalí's posthumous reputation. Though the disclosure of the number of ersatz Dalí works and the world recession of the early 1990s hurt prices of Dalí items for a time, the value of his artwork rebounded after several museums held major retrospectives in the 1990s. The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, continued to acquire works for the lavish new Dalí museum it had opened in 1982. For the average art lover, though, there had never been any question of fluctuations in critical opinion: Dalíí was surrealism.