Dalí beckoned the pop artist into his suite (always room 1610) with a theatrical swirl of his cane. Opera was playing at a deafening volume, Warhol was so nervous he was “guzzling back wine,” according to photographer David McCabe who was there to document the meeting.

Dalí grabbed an Inca headdress and placed it on Warhol’s head. The pair were there for five uncomfortable minutes before Warhol turned to McCabe and said “David, we gotta go.”

The command was prescient. On a subsequent visit, Dalí would tie Warhol to a spinning board and pour paint over him. (Dalí's antics at the St. Regis were legendary.

He would startle guests every Sunday, heading down to brunch accompanied by his pet ocelot, Babou, and once ‘accidentally’ let loose a huge box of flies intended for an artwork.)

Salvador Dalí, first pop star of painting

‘God save the King!’ was one of Dalí’s last, typically provocative, public pronouncements.

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) is certainly one of the most popular artists in the world today.

In his own lifetime, he permitted the dissemination of his work (to say nothing of fakes) in the form of huge editions of lithographs, and you can’t help but think that it was the fate of his pictures to end up as posters in the bedrooms of teenagers – often his keenest audience.

This popularity made him, in effect, the first pop star of painting, and it is not by chance that the artist quoted by Marilyn Manson during a recent promotional interview for his own exhibition of watercolours in Paris was Dalí.

On the surface, his painting is filled with nostalgia for a golden age of art, a fascination with the illusionistic and technical virtuosity of the Old Masters.

Youthful works such as The Basket of Bread 1926 are done in an ultra classical style reminiscent of Velázquez and Zurbarán.

However, there was more to Dalí than being a modern master. His re-use of paintings, such as Millet’s Angelus, revealed an ambivalent interest in religion, as much as it did the desire to recycle popular imagery.

And his special form of anti-Modernist provocation that never lessened during his lifetime, as well as his involvement in the culture industry and popular culture, may explain the current revival of interest in his work.

The Surrealist writer André Breton nicknamed him ‘Avida Dollar’– an anagram of his name – on account of his fondness for money.

Dalí had no qualms about linking art and money. He no doubt subscribed to the view of that other great personality of twentieth-century art, Andy Warhol, that ‘business is the highest artform’.

However, while Dalí represented an unhinged, irrationalist aspect of the avant-garde, Warhol represented its industrial rationalisation – transforming the model of the artist into a ‘director’, press magnate and advertising agent, and turning the traditional studio into a factory.

Part of Dalí’s allure was his visibility. While Warhol insisted that you could see his personality in the surface of his paintings, with Dalí, the question to be asked was: who was behind the public mask of the Grand Guignol showman? Like Warhol, he had an acute sense of the value of publicity and self-promotion.