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"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali." - Salvador Dali In his review of Salvador Dali's first autobiography, George Orwell announced that "One should be able to keep in one's mind simultaneously the two facts that Dali is an excellent draughtsman and a disgusting individual." If one agrees with the famous author's evaluation, Orwell catches the polarizing dynamics of Salvador Dali, and the scope to which his undeniable complex virtuosity often brushed against his penchant for provoking his audiences (not forgetting provoking long-entrenched criteria of "proper" preference). Dali, in the end, was unafraid to eschew Renaissance perspective, thereby incorporating often graphic subject matter. Quite simply, if Dali stands as one of the canonical characters of modern art, this involved positioning both a seminal role in the cannon of cutting-edge art but also a tendency to challenge audiences, challenging the contours of "Art with a Capital A". While Orwell may have segregated Dali the professional specialist from Dali the person, it would be more correct to acknowledge that the virtues of Dali's art cannot be dissociated from its provocative dynamics. Always a showman, Dali's very general public persona was predicated on pushing the restrictions of imaginative form, content, and professional identification. He was also not alone in this regard, and Dali's career cannot be segregated entirely from important modern art movements, specifically surrealism.
