A traditional description of Salvador Dali's life would certainly have angered him. The usual reciting of dates, places and lists of his works would be too pat, too boring, too plebein to describe an unusual artist who spent his life distorting reality with his paint brush and outrageous behavior.

I discovered Dali when I was an art student in the 1950s, as his fame in America suddenly blossomed after he was brought over from Spain by art dealers and high society admirers. I had been studying the masters, the immortal realists of precise painting. My idols were da Vinci, Rembrandt, Ingres, David and Michelangelo, and admired the popular American super-realist illustrator of the time, Norman Rockwell.

I could barely tolerate the impressionists, such as Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Renoir. And never could dig the abstractionists, including Picasso, Miro, Chagall and their ilk. Suddenly, upon the scene burst this strange, mustachioed extrovert whose surrealistic work seemed to combine all three disciplines. Or rather, lack of discipline, particularly in his public life.

However, I couldn't help admiring his work, because whatever Dali's paint brush distorted, ridiculed or blasphemed, the basis is always as realistically rendered as that of a da Vinci. Once Dali said, "Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is eithegood or bad." His was very, very good.

Like all Spaniards with a touch of Medieval nobility in their family's history, the painter's 1904 birth certificate spells out the lengthy name of Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech. His father was an attorney and public official in the Catalonia region.

At age 18, Dali enrolled as a student at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early photos of the tall, thin teenage Dali indicate he was influenced by the dress of other young artists of the day, with flowing black hair, billowing coat and Colonial-style trousers to the knee with long stockings. Later he added a gold-tipped cane and the upturned chin of a grandee.

His arrogant style was matched by his disdain for teachers, and he was kicked out of the San Fernanado school after three years. He was flunked because he constantly told his teachers they didn't have anywhere near the talent he did. Apparently, history has proven him absolutely correct. Even at that early age, his paintings, including his well-known, "Basket of Bread", indicated a mastery of traditional realism.

As his career

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