Artist: Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was the best surrealist painter. Max Ernst's techniques designed to channel the unconscious, Joan Miró's biomorphic fantasies and René Magritte's persistent questioning of the nature of representation give all of them a place high in the pantheon of modern art, and some will say that beside them Dalí is a fraudulent pipsqueak.
And yet it is Dalí who provokes when other surrealism has become dry. Dalí was technically brilliant, fascinated by perspective and the creation of illusion. He flirted with high modernism, going through a cubist phase, but it is his ability to make old-fashioned painting speak of disturbing modern