An eccentric and masterful Surrealist in painting and in life, Salvador Dali wrote in his diary two years before entering art school in Madrid during the early 1920s: "I'll be a genius... Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius." Throughout his life,Dali cultivated eccentricity and exaggerated a predisposition towards narcissistic exhibitionism, claiming that his creative energies were derived from it. The spectrum of imagery from fantastic to nightmarish visions which Dali produced are the supreme evidence of those idiosyncrasies.
Born in Figueras, Spain, Dali first studied at the cole des Beaux Arts in Madrid...
