Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, and was active in all sorts of media, including the movie Un Chien Andalou with the ants and the eye (if you haven't seen it, and you're a movie fan, you have no choice but to go to YouTube and watch it now—we'll wait here for you), and the short for Disney, Destino, only recently completed and released. His most famous painting is "The Persistence of Memory," and some of his best work was for an illustrated Bible. But his masterpiece, without doubt, was his creation of Salvador Dali. He was born at the perfect time to capitalize on the nascent mass media of the 20th Century, and his fame, much of which was based (surrealistically) on his fame, put Andy Warhol to shame by that particular standard. Dali was one of the founding fathers of modernism and postmodernism both, and knew what he was doing every step of the way.
There's a fun little interview on Open Culture, with some further links if you want to dig deeper in general. Since Grinwout's is an acknowledged fan of World's Fairs, we'll just note that his sojourn in New York (around the time the photo above was taken) was well publicized, to put it mildly. He took the city by storm, above and beyond what he did at the fair. I'm not sure what fair promoters were expecting from Dream of Venus, but this is what they got. Racy? Well, the '39 Fair was racy, in its way. (Look it up, if you don't believe me.)
Dali left behind some remarkable art. We can probably now evaluate the work aside from the man, but since we have the man around if we want (thank God for film!), I don't know if we really should.
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