Salvador Dali

            Artist: Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was the best surrealist painter. Max Ernst's techniques designed to channel the unconscious, Joan Miro'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 things that makes him extraordinary, for example in his rear-view portrait of his sister, Figure at a Window (1925). .
             When Dalí applied his figurative and spatial precision to surrealist dream pictures such as The Great Masturbator (1929), he gave surrealism new urgency. Later, the movement's leader André Breton said Dalí merely "insinuated himself" into surrealism, and he was thrown out. But surrealism never was as aesthetically coherent or politically virginal as most books make it sound. While the surrealists in New York were making the dreadful film Dreams That Money Can Buy , Dalí was in Hollywood, collaborating with Hitchcock to create Spellbound . .
             Subject: Mrs Isabel Styler-Tas, a client painted during Dalí's period in the US. .
             Distinguishing features: Dalí's society portraiture has always been held against him, and this is a typically egregious example of surrealist hackery. Dalí realised in the 1940s that commissioned portraiture was a good way to cash in on his fame. His dabblings in advertising, cinema, fashion and theme-park design, along with the respectability conferred by his 1941 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, made him the modern European artist with brand recognition.