Original subtitles

Modern art.

It sells for a fortune in exclusive galleries, but what's it ever done for us?

Has it influenced the clothes that we wear, or the buildings that we live in?

The cars that we drive, the books we read to our children, even the way that we think?

I'm Alastair Sooke and I earn a living writing about art.

In this series, I'm going to explore the life and work

of four titans of the 20th century -

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

They all changed their worlds, but have they changed ours?

This week, Dali.

Salvador Dali is the showman of 20th century art.

He was born with a very mischievous sense of humour.

He really honed our understanding of the absurd, showing us that anything's possible.

And he brought to life extraordinary dream worlds

in his vivid Surrealist paintings.

We all know what Surrealism means.

It's something that conjures a sense of the bizarre and the unexpected, or the irrational,

but the fact that we do is entirely thanks to Dali, who brought Surrealism into the mainstream.

But with his eccentric appearance and absurd antics,

many just dismiss him as a clown, a celebrity-hungry self-publicist.

So was the art he created really that important, and has it changed the world we live in?

If you mention Dali's name today,

most people think of a big moustache and melting clocks.

I reckon that The Persistence Of Memory is Dali's most popular painting.

This is reproduced and parodied everywhere.

The actual painting is in New York, at the Museum Of Modern Art.

So that's where I'm heading first.

And here it is.

Now, don't be fooled by its size.

This is 10 by 14 inches of Dali dynamite, exploding with ideas about

time, dreams and our most intimate fantasies and fears.

Nearly 80 years after it was painted, there's something that still haunts us about this picture.

It has the strange airless quality of a dream,

but one that's quite unsettling, that you never forget.

It's as if Dali has taken our intangible anxieties about

time passing and mortality and crystallised them in paint.

What is it that makes it so compelling?

Perhaps it's because Dali paints impossible worlds in a very realistic way.

They feel real, and in a sense, they are.

Because Dali's landscapes are based on a place that he loved,

the dramatic coastline of the north-east corner of Spain.

Dali was born 30 miles inland from here in 1904.

His father, a wealthy lawyer, was a strict disciplinarian, while his mother spoilt him.

And it was Felipa who first encouraged Dali's art.

His childhood memories, dreams and desires

seared themselves onto his mind so much that arguably, they saturate almost every painting he later made.

Dali once said, "I have been made in these rocks,

"here have I shaped my personality.

"I cannot separate myself from this sky, this sea, these rocks."

Nestling in this rocky coastline is the town of Cadaques.

The Dali family used to spend their holidays here,

and it is where I'm meeting Dali's biographer, Ian Gibson.

He felt utterly, totally and madly in love with the place,

and I can understand why, cos it's quite magical.

Tell me about Dali's family.

Well, he had a terrific family.

I mean, this photograph, which was taken more or less here, and this is Dali sitting there.

What would he be, five or six years old?

I love the fact that he's positioned himself right in the middle at this early stage.

He always had to be at the centre of things.

How important is it to understand this place in terms of his later art? It's absolutely vital.

All the early drawings, early paintings, the church figures in I do not know how many of them.

I would say everything here, the people, the houses, the architecture, the boats...

Without Cadaques, there is no Dali.

It's as straightforward as that.

I think, really, he identifies totally with this landscape.

Dali's childhood paintings of Cadaques show his incredible natural talent.

He made this one when he was just 15.

You know, he could draw from the day he was born.

I suppose that's why he thought very early on he was a genius.

He could do it and everyone said, "he can do it. When he paints a duck, it's a duck.

"When it's a swan, it's a swan," his mother said, as he scratched off the paint on the table.

He just was born with this gift.

It's hard to believe from his gentle sun-drenched teenage paintings that

Dali actually had a troubled, anxious childhood.

It was only in later years that these anxieties would be reflected in his work.

This screen is stunning. It's stunning.

It must have influenced Dali as a boy, don't you think?

Absolutely. I mean, you couldn't but be mesmerised by this altarpiece.

Lots of Dali's later paintings, his surreal masterpieces, they are

really very disturbing, quite unsettling.

There's a darker side to Dali which starts to emerge here as well.

Absolutely, there is a darker side, and those empty beaches

with hardly anybody there, distant figures, always alone.

I think he was terribly lonely.

And anxious, and very, very timid.

And then there is the anxiety about his mother.

He is very close to his mother, but his mother is

not very well, and she dies when he is very young.

And that's a terrible loss. Then he is left alone.

He has to face his father, a very violent figure.

And Dali is frightened of his father.

He admires him, he would like to be like him, but he's frightened of him.

When he was 18, Dali moved to Madrid to study fine art.

Here, so he began to overcome his extreme shyness by developing a new, eccentric persona.

He began to work dandyish outfits, and grew what would eventually become his famous moustache.

His student art displayed outstanding technical ability.

And Dali certainly knew it.

His shyness was transformed into unbridled self-belief.

He was actually expelled for making the outrageous statement that

none of his teachers was good enough to examine his work.

Going to Madrid was the first step in a young Salvador becoming Dali.

Dali was in his early twenties when he first heard about the group of experimental artists in Paris

who were creating strange, fantastical work.

So strange, in fact, that a new word had to be invented to describe their art - surreal.

Discovering surrealism would change Dali's life.

What was Surrealism?

Well, it started out as a literary and artistic movement that was

launched by this man, who was the French poet Andre Breton, in 1924.

It began really as a revolutionary response to the devastations of the First World War, and also,

it was inspired by the psychoanalytical theories of the great Sigmund Freud.

Freud believed that all of us have got this inner, unconscious world in which our emotional and sexual

feelings are repressed, and that the only way to express ourselves

is to release these emotions, but without censoring what comes out.

The Surrealists were fascinated by the bizarre and quickly decided that they needed to explore this new,

forbidden landscape of the unconscious mind.

Someone like Giorgio de Chirico created strange and haunting landscapes in which these odd,

oversized objects that really don't belong together dominate the canvas.

A little bit later, the Belgian artist Rene Magritte started

painting conventional bowler-hatted businessmen pouring out the sky.

Putting it all up together, suddenly you realise why the young Dali

instinctively knew that Surrealism was the artistic movement for him.

He could express himself with impunity and put onto the canvas

all of his inner desires, fears, obsessions and anxieties.

Like here, in one of his earliest Surrealist paintings, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood.

The barren shore of Cadaques is scattered with strange objects that

represent his childhood and adult anxieties.

Inspired by Freud's ideas, he is liberating his unconscious obsessions through his art.

Death and sex were clearly on the 23-year-old Dali's mind.

To extract these strange visions from his deepest psyche, Dali developed a technique

that he called the paranoiac critical method,

based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories.

I haven't a clue what Dali meant by this, so I am on my way to meet

psychoanalyst Darian Leader, in the hope he can explain.

We are meeting at the house in north London where Freud lived after escaping Nazi-occupied Austria.

Dali himself visited here in 1938, to pay his dues to the great man.

So this is Freud's study.

This is actually the study? It is indeed.

And this is the couch? This is Fraud's original couch, indeed.

I have heard a lot about this quite complicated term, the paranoiac critical method. What does it mean?

I think the main thing of interest is the notion of paranoia.

This is what Dali was really interested in in the late 1920s, early 1930s, and then beyond.

He saw paranoia as an essential mechanism in the construction of reality, so that when we see,

let's say some rocks or a cliff, we could say, that's just some rocks or a cliff,

but we could also see in it the human form, perhaps even something looking at us, a big

pair of eyes, exactly what would be classified as a paranoiac delusion.

Dali, in a sense, explores and develops this idea in his painting.

So, for example, here, seen from one angle, we have a scene,

perhaps in a desert or on a beach, a number of figures in front of a dwelling with some trees behind it.

Then turn it, and we see, fairly clearly, a human face.

Now, what's the correct way to interpret the image?

Dali's saying that both of those ways of reading the visual data

give us different answers, exactly the kind of emphasis on double images that Dali was so fascinated in.

Dali is arguing we interpret the visual data

that we are receiving, and we can interpret it in different ways.

There is a fundamental question about how we interpret the world around us.

So Dali's idea is a bit like that game we play as kids when you gaze at clouds

and let your imagination run wild, perceiving animals, objects and faces in the random shapes.

But instead of clouds, Dali would head out to the rocks near Cadaques

armed with his sketchbook, to let an alternative reality suggest itself to him.

Local fisherman Moses, who met Dali when he was a boy, is familiar with the artist's old haunts.

These rocks appear in so many of his paintings.

It is amazing just being a few metres

away from them, because suddenly it feels that we are floating in the middle of one of his landscapes.

Do you find when you are fishing you pass these rocks and see all sorts of things?

Oh yeah, and it depends on the light, on the weather.

You get really inspired by these rocks.

Look at the camel.

I can... What, there? Yeah, right.

It looks like he has just squatted down in the middle of the desert.

Exactly. And further down, now he is a rhinoceros up there.

Ah, I love the rhinoceros! This is... Dali was obsessed with rhinos. Yes. That's why.

I thought the guy was a little bit nuts and that he would just

see things in the rocks which maybe other people couldn't see. Yeah, but you can.

But genuinely, that looks like a rhino leaping up the rocks, and the camel that has squatted down.

I'm trying to match this up to the landscape...

There's one very famous Dali picture that I am told is based on a specific outcrop.

The picture is the extraordinarily named The Great Masturbator.

It was inspired by a rock that, to Dali, at least,

suggested a great face lying nose down. OK.

They are all fantastical shapes. Yeah.

I feel a bit like I am approaching Skull Island or something.

Is this it? Yes, this is it.

This is the one. Let's just get a better angle. Hang on.

Ah, I'm starting to recognise it.

There's his nose, massive nose.

Face down. Exactly. This is it.

It just looks like a piece of bone which has been dropped here.

But it looks much better from the other side. This is the rock.

You can see it's exactly the same shape,

a bit of rock that goes up there which corresponds to this part of the painting, which is above.

Today, the original hangs in Madrid's Reina Sofia gallery.

Amazingly, in that one rock, Dali's imagination didn't just see

a face on its nose, but a disturbing array of his own sexual desires,

insecurities and phobias.

Here you can see that everything coalesces, comes together.

It's utterly surreal, but it's also uniquely Dali.

It gives a very, very complex, fraught vision of Dali's mind at the time.

Out of his head in his very fluid, dreamlike way, comes this explosion of imagery.

In it, he put all of his obsessions, phobias, anxieties.

Clamped onto the mouth of the self portrait is a grasshopper.

He was so scared of locusts as a child and suddenly, here it is, right rammed up against his face.

And over on this side you have this, well it's not really suggestive, it's quite explicit,

kind of petrified, rather beautiful woman's face looking at the nether regions of a bloke standing nearby.

And beneath it, almost like a parody of this part, is the lion's face

with his tongue really lewdly lolling out and standing up on end.

Around it are these fangs which are saying, maybe all is not that well in the bedroom.

If you look right down here you see this figure in the distance

and his long shadow leads you right to the horizon where, it's so tiny,

that's probably a memory of Dali with his mother or father walking on the beach at Cadaques.

I love that sense of complete distortions of scale with

a real clarity, a luminosity that as a picture, works beautifully, just holds together.

In 1929, Dali took the imagery he had dreamt up for his paintings and reworked them into a film,

the extraordinary Un Chien Andalou, which he made with his art school friend and film-maker, Luis Bunuel.

An astonishingly weird nightmare of irrational and gruesome images

combined with absurd humour, it was a landmark moment in both the history of surrealism and cinema.

On the evening of the premiere, Dali and Bunuel supposedly carried stones in their pockets just in

case the crowd reacted badly and things got really out of hand but it was a triumph.

Andre Breton was amazed.

He wrote, "With Dali, it is perhaps for the first time that our mental windows have been opened wide."

Dali may have been a latecomer to the movement but

the Surrealists quickly recognised that this provocative young talent was their new champion.

One of Surrealism's greatest legacies has been

in film and television and particularly in comedy.

Today's comedians, such as the League of Gentlemen,

or the Mighty Boosh,

like Dali, combine the absurd with the macabre,

the profound with the ridiculous.

Eels! Eels!

So, how much does the comedian, Noel Fielding, who stars in the Mighty Boosh, owe to Dali?

I think, with surrealism, it's what me and Julian call a snot bubble laugh,

which is where you laugh because you can't stop yourself laughing, it's so absurd.

There are two types of laugh. If you watch Rory Bremner or something,

it's good, but you sort of go, "Oh yeah, that's good, yeah."

But then there's a sort of laugh that hopefully you get out of our show, or Vic Reeves' show,

where you just go, that is actually ridiculous.

And you just can't stop yourself laughing because

the absurdity of it has made your brain slightly implode.

I don't want to do comedy that people could do themselves.

For me, that the criteria. That's what I like about Dali.

He has ideas that I don't think you could have had yourself.

I just like the ideas. The first time I saw a burning giraffe, a giraffe on fire.

It's in the back of one of his paintings. It's not even very big.

It's just in the corner.

I thought, "that's amazing. I have to sort of know more about this person."

If you had to pinpoint what you find particularly funny about Dali, what would it be?

He's like a sort of, he's like a make-believe character, isn't he?

He turned everything upside down. He's committed

to being a Surrealist and to getting a reaction

and I think that makes him authentic and I think that only good comedy is authentic.

In the summer of 1929, basking in his success within the surrealist camp,

Dali returned to Cadaques, where a major change was about to occur in his private life, too.

Before long he would meet his future wife, soulmate and lifelong muse, Gala.

Soon they would buy a tiny fisherman's shack just over the bay

here in their remote village of Port Lligat and this would be their home for the following 50 years.

Over the decades it expanded into a labyrinth of whitewashed rooms dedicated to dreams and pleasure.

Russian-born Gala was 10 years older than Dali

and when they first met in the summer of 1929,

she was already married to the French surrealist poet, Paul Eluard.

But with Dali it was love at first sight.

Over the summer they grew ever closer,

so much so that she left her husband and child to be with Dali.

Gala became Dali's muse and manager.

Over the years she appeared in more than 50 of his paintings.

She has been described as part tiger, part martyr, part mother,

part mistress and part banker.

This is Dali's studio.

And what an amazing space.

You can see immediately...

Look at these enormous windows letting in all of this beautiful Port Lligat light.

You just had to look out of the window and you would see

this view which almost was like a ready-made painting.

He just had to transcribe it onto canvas and there was a beautiful landscape.

You can imagine a couple of melting watches floating there and you've got your Dali masterpiece.

He always sat down in this white armchair and had the canvas arranged on this structure in front of him.

This was really ingenious.

It allows Dali to move the canvas up and down through the floor, so he could paint on this vast scale.

You can see all of his paints and brushes.

The detail is so precise and important to him that he had to

use these tools, these very fine sable haired brushes to kind of get the effect that he needed.

The combination of Gala's support and this wonderful location was a catalyst for Dali.

Here in the 1930s he produced many of his most famous paintings.

They have the classic Dali elements.

The desolate landscapes.

Stark light, sharp shadows, mutated, displaced objects and optical illusions.

Here, a half-kneeling figure becomes a hand holding an egg.

This is the grand entrance to Dali's house at Port Lligat.

In fact, this small space was the original fisherman's shack that he bought

so, first of all, this was the only bit that he lived in.

Gradually, the whole place evolved outwards, like cellular growth.

And in later years, when people came to meet them, you can see

they'd be met by this ferocious polar bear.

Dali's surprisingly tasteful home was full of these unusual and unexpected objects.

With the exotic stuffed animals,

giant eggs,

weird sculptures

and sexually suggestive shapes,

it's like walking into one of his paintings.

But then, Dali took surrealism far beyond just painting.

It permeated every aspect of his life.

In the 1930s he was a pioneer of the surreal object.

He would combine unusual and unlikely everyday things which,

when together, became something absurd yet strangely affecting.

Most famously of all, he created the lobster telephone.

One man who bought into Dali's surreal objects was the British patron, Edward James.

I have come to his Sussex mansion to meet art curator, Ghislaine Wood

and see some of the work that he commissioned.

Hi, Ghislaine. Hi, Alastair.

What a grand place. It is. It's amazing, isn't it?

This is the vast country house of Edward James who was a millionaire

patron of Salvador Dali and lots of other surrealists, and he was probably

the most important patron of contemporary art in Britain in the 1920s and '30s.

And this was his parents' house, this vast country pile, but he didn't feel very comfortable here, so he

moved into the hunting lodge in the grounds of West Dean, Monkton House,

and transformed it into this extraordinary Surrealist environment.

It's purple. It is. He covered the exterior in this stucco, and then painted it bright purple.

It became a showcase house for Edward's collection of Surrealist works.

What he did was take Dali's ideas and then have them made by his decorating firm.

What sort of things?

Well, the lips sofa, which is just over here, one of the most iconic objects he created.

This is possibly the sexiest sofa I have ever seen.

It is, it's the Mae West Lips sofa. It's a very playful piece.

If you want to take it further,

it has all these other more disturbing meanings.

Here, we have the idea of fetishisation, just completely embodied.

All sorts of very erotic and disturbing ideas, but in a piece of luxury interior design.

Hang on, I'm looking at this and it looks like a sumptuous pair of plump, juicy pink lips.

You're saying this is dark and disturbing?

It is, because if you think about it, you sit in the mouth.

As soon as you interact with this object, you are creating a dialogue between you and the object

which is what Dali was so brilliant at doing and what much contemporary art has explored later on.

But the idea is that you are being swallowed into this female mouth.

Upstairs we can see another version, the one in red felt.

Edward James loved it so much that he got it repeated again and again.

He did. In fact, Edward had five made.

Wow! Incredible. Yes.

Imagine having this at the foot of your bed.

This is one of the most famous things of the 20th century?

And this is just in Edward James's bedroom.

It actually was made as a working telephone.

It's the ultimate Surrealist composite object.

What it does is, it takes two completely disparate

pre-existing things, a lobster and a telephone, puts them together and creates a fantastic new reality.

Why do you think that this one has become so incredibly famous?

It's a very simple idea, brilliantly done.

Of course, there's fantastic slippage between the shape of the receiver and

the lobster but also the idea of talking to a lobster is of course a very witty and humorous thing.

I love this chair. This is obviously just a pun on "armchair".

It is. And again, derived from an idea by Salvador Dali.

These arms are really grasping for someone's bottom to come and sit on it.

Well, indeed, or tickling your back, depending on how you sit in it.

I probably just revealed too much about myself!

That's the thing about Dali, it's all very subjective and personal.

It's not Edward James's home that's been shaped by Dali.

Surrealism's playful and unexpected transformation of everyday objects

has had a huge influence on interior design.

One thing that Dali's surrealist objects teach us is that anything is possible.

Why shouldn't a lobster or even a hamburger be a telephone?

Why can't you sit on an enormous orange dog in the privacy of your own home?

One thing that Dali has introduced into the world of interior design is a sense of playfulness, wit and fun.

Look at this. It's a contemporary piece.

It's a chair by the designer, David Pomper.

It's got these little silver legs.

I just know that Dali would have loved this.

This is really a latter-day Surrealist object.

By now, Dali's ambitions were limitless.

Ever the provocateur, he wanted to preach the gospel of surrealism to as wide an audience as possible.

And in the '30s there was only one place in the world where he could really do that. New York.

We all know that today's artists manipulate the way they are presented in the media.

Everyone from Madonna and Tracey Emin to Lady Gaga

play up to the cameras and understand the power of publicity.

But in many ways it was Dali who blazed a trail for them.

When he arrived here in New York, the circus had come to town.

New York became a showcase for Dali's work.

He exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art,

designed shop windows on Fifth Avenue and even made a surreal installation at the World's Fair.

He called this creation "The Dream of Venus."

A pleasure dome filled with naked women and unfettered desire.

The Persistence of Memory was unveiled in New York in 1932.

It was originally bought for just $250

but the reaction to it, and to Dali, was immense.

Dali once said, "Fame was as intoxicating to me as a spring morning."

And here in America he found fame like he'd never known it before.

He loved it here.

Ever the consummate showman, he quickly realised that America might just be his oyster

and, soon enough, he was swept up in a frenzy of self-promotion.

In 1936 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine,

a huge deal for an eccentric young Spanish artist, barely into his 30s.

The reporter at the time said that Dali had

"a faculty for publicity that should turn any circus press agent green with envy."

And it's true. Dali was a master at staging spectacular stunts that generated huge amounts of hype.

He appeared in Life magazine six times and even created

his own newspaper, which was called, of course, the Dali News.

Dali was one of the first artists in history to so wantonly court publicity.

He was also one of the first to inject some irreverent fun into the pompous, earnest world of fine art.

He was the trailblazer for later superstar artists

like Andy Warhol and, more recently, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

This studio belongs to Jeff Koons, one of the most successful artists working anywhere in the world today.

His art sells for millions of dollars and it's witty, playful

and irreverent and definitely draws upon Dali's sense of the surreal.

He's absolutely one of my favourite artists so I'm really excited to be meeting him.

Koons and his team transform familiar objects into witty and pretty bizarre works of art.

Recently, his work has included inflatable toys

that pay homage to Dali's moustache and his love of lobsters.

When I saw this, I loved the shape of it,

that it's both a male and female but if you look at the tentacles,

it's pretty much like Dali's moustache.

Hugely like it, yeah.

Also, it's masculine.

it has arms like an acrobat, quite athletic, but the tail is like

a Venus. Yeah. Is this, in a way, your portrait of Dali?

I think it makes reference to Dali and one of Dali's great friends, Marcel Duchamp.

They always print on these pool toys that this is not a lifesaving device

but, you know, art is a lifesaving device and so I always always like that

kind of contradiction and also this gives you a sense of equilibrium when you're in the water.

Koons's work is joyfully surreal.

From his balloon dog and silver rabbit, to his huge puppy

made out of flowers, you can see the debt to Dali,

who he first encountered when he was a teenager.

I met Dali in '73.

I found out that he was at the St Regis hotel so I called up and he answered the phone.

I told him, I'm just a young artist. I'd love to meet him.

He said, come up Saturday morning and I'll meet you at the hotel at noon.

I arrived, I was there, and right at noon, he was in the lobby and he had

on a fur coat and a tie with diamond pins in it and an elaborate cane.

I have a photo. I'd love to show you.

This is a photograph from that moment and I just remember I was very...excited.

I remember him saying, "We have to hurry up".

He fixed his moustache, he put it up.

He said, "You have to hurry up, Jeff, because I can't hold this pose all day".

I don't know if he said Jeff, it was probably "young boy".

You'd like to think he did. That evening, I thought, I can do this, too.

Art can be a complete way of life for me.

I can spend all my time doing it.

I really had a sense of possibility.

I think Dali very much was about the expansion of horizon and possibly

a great symbol of the avant-garde.

So Dali's work expanded the boundaries of what's possible,

challenging and unsettling us, by throwing together the unexpected.

That's just what we see walking down today's catwalks.

Like the late Alexander McQueen's designs, which drew on unlikely way-out references.

Even high street fashion has embraced surrealism and this is

largely thanks to Dali who, back in the '30s, was turning clothes into an extension of his art.

Taking inspiration from his paintings, like this one, he and fashion designer

Elsa Schiaparelli created a range of surrealist tinged clothing.

The tear dress created the illusion of ripped skin showing the flesh beneath.

And the shoe hat turned convention on its head.

They even designed a dress featuring Dali's favourite crustacean,

which he thought was somehow sexually suggestive,

an allusion perhaps not lost on Wallis Simpson just before she married Edward VIII.

Today, celebrities like Lady Gaga certainly continue the tradition of seriously surreal fashion.

The glittering world of high fashion acquainted Dali with jewellery,

another delight for his inventive spirit.

He designed brooches like tearful eyes

and ruby red lips with pearls for teeth.

But it wasn't just wearable jewellery.

Typically, Dali pushed things even further later in his career, blurring the line between

jewellery and sculpture, creating jaw-droppingly intricate objects

that on closer inspection deliver a surreal twist.

In 2007, Damien Hirst made headlines with his skull covered in more than 8,500 diamonds.

It was on sale for £50 million.

But Dali had got there first.

More than half a century before Damien Hirst caused

a sensation with his diamond skull,

Dali was already designing jewellery and pretty weird jewellery at that.

This piece is called The Royal Heart and it consists of a heart made of

rubies that's beating in the middle of a gold setting.

It's not to everybody's taste.

It's quite brash and possibly even grotesque but there's something quite mesmerising about watching

this very hard substance, the ruby, look incredibly soft and flesh-like there in the middle of the brooch.

By the 1940s, Dali had produced numerous Surrealist masterpieces,

made a ground-breaking film, and introduced surrealism to fashion and jewellery.

The really weird thing is that even though Dali had done all of this stuff to promote

Surrealism right around the world, make it this incredibly famous

and popular artistic movement, the founder of the movement, Andre Breton, wasn't happy.

He actually expelled Dali from the Surrealists altogether, ridiculing

his love of fame and money with a catchy anagram

that transforms form Salvador Dali into Avida Dollars, which basically means greedy for bucks.

More seriously, the predominantly left-wing

Surrealists took deep offence when Dali failed to protest against the rise of fascism across Europe.

They particularly disapproved of him depicting Hitler in some of his paintings.

The Surrealists may have disowned him, but Dali didn't care.

He thought he WAS Surrealism, with or without the official stamp.

He simply aimed his sights higher and headed to Hollywood, known as the Dream Factory, after all.

As soon as he arrived, he was in the limelight, throwing lavish, bizarre and star-studded parties.

Ever since Dali's early success with his surreal films, he'd been

keen to return to the biggest, most mainstream canvas on offer -

cinema.

In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock commissioned Dali to design

the dream sequences for his new psychological thriller, Spellbound.

The film starred Ingrid Bergman as a frosty psychoanalyst who falls in love with her amnesiac

patient, played by Gregory Peck, who might or might not be a killer.

It was one of the first films to treat the subject of psychoanalysis

seriously, paving the way for Hitchcock's later masterpieces like Psycho and Vertigo.

The studio loved the idea of Dali's involvement because it guaranteed free publicity.

They estimated that the commercial value of his name was $50,000, an enormous amount for the '40s.

For his part, Dali believed that he was about to ignite Hollywood with his Surrealist art.

It seemed to be a gambling house.

Dali designed the backdrops for a dream sequence in which he

re-visited the eye-slitting moment that he devised in Chien Andalou.

Hitchcock understood exactly why Dali was going to work so well on film.

I requested Dali. Selznick, the producer, had the impression I wanted Dali for the publicity value.

That wasn't it at all. What I was after was, again, the thing we talked about earlier.

The vividness of dreams.

As you know, Dali's work is very solid and very sharp,

with very long perspectives

and black shadows.

This was, again, the importance of the cliche.

All dreams in movies are blurred.

It isn't true.

Dali was the best man for me to do the dreams because that's what dreams should be.

So that was the reason I had Dali.

During the filming of Spellbound, Dali met another filmmaker with whom he could collaborate - Walt Disney.

At the beginning of 1946, Dali arrived here at the Walt Disney

Studios to work on a six-minute animated film called Destino.

Fort the next eight weeks, he clocked in every morning

like a regular employee and headed down Dopey Drive to make his preparatory sketches.

Dali loved the creative possibilities of animation.

Now, he could take all the elements of his paintings, the melting forms,

illusions and optical trickery, to a fantastical new level.

Dali's animation was, in fact, never made in his lifetime.

Instead, his drawings remained here in the Disney archives until 2003, when animator Dave Bossert

finally brought Dali's vision to life.

Dali had always admired Walt Disney's animation,

He thought that was a natural extension of Surrealism.

I've got a couple of examples of some of his visual development work.

This is actually one of my favourite pieces.

I really like this piece a lot.

There's a baby carriage for this woman's head and she's wearing snail

slippers, which are kind of interesting. What does it mean?

You know, it beats me.

I don't know what it means but I like looking at it.

This one is showing our hero,

she's dancing up this incline, and there's this vat of eyeballs

here and when she gets up to the top,

she's going to go off and fall into a big basket of eyeballs.

Don't ask me to tell you what that means.

Anything like melting clocks, or a telephone receiver like a spider,

those things are just perfect for animation, absolutely perfect.

They're whimsical, they're fantasy, they're fun.

Those are the types of things you want to see in animation.

By the 1950s, Dali was the world famous champion of Surrealism

and would try his hand at almost anything.

As the years passed, his moustache grew ever longer and his behaviour became ever more eccentric.

Like a circus showman,

he constantly engineered weird stunts that would attract headlines.

One of many was his 12 metre-long loaf of bread.

Many felt that Dali was undermining his reputation.

They were dismayed that the man who created such

groundbreaking and influential work was descending into buffoonery.

But Dali's antics popularised surrealism, taking it far beyond the elite world of fine art.

MUSIC: "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins

Today, it's everywhere.

You can hardly turn on your TV without encountering the surreal.

I've come to meet top ad exec Robert Senior to find out why today's

commercials in particular are so often so surreal.

I should start by saying I really love that ad and part of the reason

I love it is because you've got this gorilla who looks so soulful

and kind of sad and melancholy and then he lets rip and starts drumming and it's all really good fun.

What it's got to do with chocolate, I don't know at all, but my understanding is that it works.

The start point was, we want to bring to life and dramatise, if you like, unbridled joy. Why a gorilla?

Why not? Isn't that precisely the point of Surrealism?

Things are so much more beguiling the less you understand them.

But, something else like, I don't know, a lizard doing the can-can, that wouldn't work?

It could have been. You see, that's the wrong lens. That's the lens.

To try and understand why, to try and apply a cognitive analysis to it, is to miss the point.

Its start point isn't, I want you to think differently about this.

The start point is, I want you to feel an emotion about that.

The art of a great salesman is they don't have to sell.

And Surrealism takes you away from the real quite literally into another

place and makes you feel something that you can quite rationalise.

If you take Dali himself, I think he really understood branding in its truest sense.

He understood the importance of being... of the element of surprise.

And yet he was very consistent in that, including in how he presented himself.

And that's the mark of a great brand.

He understood branding so much that he started appearing in ads.

And I've brought along a disc with a couple of his best ads on it.

I don't think you've ever seen them. No, I haven't seen them.

But it would be good to get your professional opinion if that's all right. Yeah, sure.

Happy bubbles but devoted bubbles.

Then the Alka Seltzer shoots into the stomach.

Here, it neutralises that bad excess acid.

Meantime, the special aspirin is speeding into your bloodstream

to all places of pain, so those beautiful places will feel beautiful again.

Alka Seltzer is a work of art, truly one of a kind, like Dali.

I think the first one, with the Alka Seltzer, was genius.

It's a magnificently engaging product demo.

And it's fantastic because it's bonkers.

And you have a Surrealist being surreal about an incredibly logical piece of science.

That's a juxtaposition if ever there was one. I think that was great.

I think the chocolate one was pointless. Pointless?

I loved the chocolate one!

Exactly, great. And you'll buy it, and I won't. That's how it goes.

That's how it works.

So Dali was more than happy to peddle his own brand of Surrealism

for commercial gain, like here in an advert for stockings.

Dali even designed the logo for this incredibly familiar lollipop.

I had loads of these when I was a kid, but what I never actually knew

was that, all the time, I was licking a Surrealist work of art.

Despite the stunts and commercial ventures,

Dali's postwar career did deliver some of his most popular paintings.

A new fascination with religion informed pictures like The Temptation of St Anthony.

Recalling the imagery of his childhood, Dali fused the Virgin

with Gala in his painting, The Madonna of Port Lligat.

The Crucifixion inspired him, too.

In 1951, he painted Christ of St John of The Cross.

Its bold perspective, apparently inspired by a dream,

reveals the coast of Cadaquez beneath a hovering cross.

And with the onset of the Cold War and the nuclear age, another big theme caught his imagination.

Just as Freud had preoccupied Dali early in his career, now nuclear

physics, the science behind the atom bomb, obsessed him most of all.

He was about to enter a new phase as an artist

and would soon anoint himself the first painter of the atomic age.

He christened this phase Nuclear Mysticism and began reworking,

some say recycling, his most famous motifs, reflecting how the fabric of life is made up of moving atoms.

Everything jumping and romping in a completely extraordinary, a rhythmic feeling.

And all your life will be to the rhythm of atomic explosions.

Exactly, one new kind of atomic and nuclear mysticism.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Dali split his time between his home in Spain, Paris and New York,

performing that famous caricature version of himself and continuing to court publicity and controversy.

This is where Dali stayed whenever he was in New York, the rather grand St Regis Hotel where he held court,

entertained his many admirers and acolytes and got up to all sorts of incredibly surreal mischief.

His HQ was in the hotel bar.

And here, every Sunday evening, crowds would arrive to get a glimpse of the great artist.

In the Seventies, artist Louis Markoya befriended him here.

There was a round table that Dali was sitting at with a large candelabra lit,

and it was very much like a talk show host thing, where Dali was the host.

And the most famous, the most rich or the most outrageous person was the one that got to sit next to him next.

Anybody who was rich and famous stopped by - the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead.

You name the people - David Bowie, Andy Warhol was always here.

Warhol had, at one time, made a gift to Dali of a Marilyn lithograph that he had done.

He gave him one of the Marilyns?

He gave him one of the Marilyns. It was, I would say, 24 inches square, something like that.

He didn't think Warhol was a very good painter at all.

And Dali promptly put it on the floor, unzipped his fly and pissed on it.

In front of him? In front of Warhol, which Warhol didn't mind at all.

He thought it was really great. There was a lot of wild stuff.

There was a time where we talked about horseshoe crabs because of

their shape and because they had these projectiles that look like

rhinoceros horns that I had made helmets for Dali and Gala actually to wear. Really? Can I model it?

Yes, I'm more than happy for you to put it on.

Which way round does this thing go? It goes on like this. It has

a velvet liner so you just put your elastic on.

What do you reckon? We just wore them for the night in the bar, actually, and

just saw the reactions of people. I've also brought a project that

I did with Dali that came to be known as the Flying Fried Eggs.

Essentially, three fried eggs

on a hovercraft. This is a toy, is it?

And the hovercraft is a toy.

Dali had fried eggs in many of his paintings and I brought the idea to him and we made this toy.

This is great, I love it!

So we made the fried eggs and we walked them into the lobby and we

walked them from here to the Plaza and created a huge commotion.

By the time we got to the Plaza, there were probably 400 or 500 people following the eggs.

He really was the carrier of Surrealism and lived it all the time.

Dali's exhibitionist clowning helped destroy the archetype of the solemn, suffering artist.

Come on.

Art and artists in the future would be a lot more playful, irreverent and conspicuous.

But Dali wasn't just playing the fool in the final decades of his life.

Back home in Spain, he'd been working on his last great project,

a monument to that brand of Surrealism that had become his life's work.

This is the Dali Theatre Museum in Figueres.

You could call it the largest Surrealist object in the world.

Its design encapsulates lots of Dali's obsessions - the golden statuettes refer to Hollywood.

There are eggs, spherical atoms, and the red facade is studded

with these bread rolls which Dali thought were like goose bumps, ruffling the building's skin.

He wanted everyone who visited his museum to feel like they were walking into a theatrical dream.

This place is unbelievable.

This is the central courtyard of Dali's Theatre Museum

and I feel like I've walked right into the middle of his brain.

Dali once said that he wanted to produce a dream that could also be used as a living room.

And this is what he came up with.

He hung some pictures on the wall, he created a strange pink fireplace stocked with logs and, in the middle

of the room, he placed one of his most famous ever inventions -

a ravishing pair of red lips that also double up as a sofa.

And the view of it is much better from up here.

The installation is typical of his work - it's playful, it's witty, it's unexpected, it's irreverent.

It's certainly surreal and, most of all, it's very, very sexy.

The museum opened in 1974 and Dali, now in his seventies,

painted the ceiling to commemorate what he felt was his legacy.

As the managing director of the Gala Salvador Dali Foundation, Juan Manuel Sevillano explains.

It's the summing up of a lot of the powerful symbols he created throughout his years.

His legacy will be a source of richness, wealth and well-being for his city.

As you can see, there's a rainfall of gold there and all his creations dancing.

This somehow leads us to a moment where him and Gala

look up the path they would follow towards the afterlife.

And somehow, Dali comes to terms with the terror that filled his life about dying and moving on.

Is it true that some people, when they come here, they're quite sniffy about the museum?

Some people are because they come with the wrong expectations.

They expect to see a museum, you know, a gallery with square rooms and paintings placed one next

to each other with exactly the same separation between them and a lot of literature under them, which is fine.

It is a reasonable expectation.

But this place is unreasonable, so you have to brace for

what is going to hit you once you walk in through the door.

This was painted quite late on in his career, I think, in the Seventies.

Some people are quite dismissive about his later works and see this kind of thing as quite kitsch

and almost silly, with the big feet and everything.

Do you think that's unfair?

Yes. I think he did a whole bunch of things that were not understood

back then by his contemporaries but are now what all our great contemporary artists are doing.

He was the first person to understand mass culture and mass communication.

I think that it is time that we started really

understanding how important Dali was for the world of 20th century art and for what has come after.

Dali died in January 1989.

He was buried at the centre of the museum which is now his mausoleum.

When I started this film, I knew that Dali was a really brilliant painter.

His early Surrealist pictures really are true masterpieces of the 20th century.

They conjure up all the desires and also anxieties that underpin the modern world.

But what I have discovered is that there's so much more to this exuberant Spanish genius.

Dali liberated what it meant to be an artist and used that wild persona

to communicate the ideas of Surrealism to a worldwide audience.

And just look. Dali left an indelible mark -

everything from cinema to painting to jewellery and fashion to design and advertising, even comedy.

There isn't much that Dali hasn't changed.

As he said himself, "When I paint, the sea roars.

"The others just splash about in the bath."

If you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence

of Matisse, Picasso,

Dali and Warhol, then go online.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail: subtitling@bbc.co.uk