Salvador Dalí was a great artist who is almost equally famous as a self-publicist and showman. Dalí and his moustaches are a familiar image for millions who have never been near an art gallery. But the showman was also one of the key artistic figures of the 20th century, and those who scorned Dalí as a charlatan had to come to terms that he was the creator of a host of dazzling images, some of which, like the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory, have entered the general consciousness.

Dalí painted his most famous, and probably his best works in the decade 1929-39, using a 'paranoiac-critical method' of his own devising. It involved various forms of irrational association, notably using images which changed according to the viewer's perception of them, so that a group of fighting soldiers could suddenly be seen as a woman's face. A distinctive feature of Dalí's art was that, however bizarre the imagery, it was always painted in an impeccable 'academic' technique, with 'photographic' accuracy of a kind that most avant-garde artist contemporaries regarded as outmoded.