A widely advertised exhibition of the works of Salvador Dali called to my mind his long residence in New York, where the painter, who claimed to recall the moment of his conception, was a public figure for four decades.

His artistic vision was founded in self-discipline, hard work, and sound training. He pressed his teachers for technical training: how to draw, mix the oils, spread the colors, and blend the tones. To his adolescent disgust, they espoused anarchism: Students should paint what they saw. Thus, when assigned to paint a Gothic statue of the Virgin, he produced an exquisite pair of scales. The perplexed instructor murmured, “Perhaps you see a Virgin like everyone else, but I see a pair of scales.”

However bizarre the subject matter, his works had geometric rigor and detachment. But his intellect was combined with a pose of eccentricity that was no more spontaneous than his paintings, which proved a publicist’s dream.

Dali first visited New York in 1934, a year after his first, wildly successful one-man Manhattan show at the Julien Levy Gallery. Already famous for iconographic works such as “The Persistence of Memory,” he arrived with his wife Gala (a born business manager, she had “a gaze that would penetrate bank vaults”), famously insisting to reporters that “The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.” Two years later he effectively hijacked the Museum of Modern Art’s Surrealist show when his portrait made the cover of Time.

In 1939 Bonwit Teller commissioned him to design store windows. “Day” featured a bathtub lined with black astrakhan, filled with water from which rose three wax arms holding mirrors, beside which stood a dusty turn-of-the-century mannequin, decorated only with red hair and green feathers. In “Night,” another disreputable-looking mannequin lay on a bed of glowing coals, the canopy of which was a stuffed buffalo’s head adorned with jewels.

When passers-by complained that the windows were obscene, management replaced the mannequins. Dali demanded the store either remove his name or restore the work. When Bonwit Teller refused to do either, Dali overturned “Day’s” bathtub, smashing the window. He was arrested but a sympathetic magistrate gave him a suspended sentence, holding that every artist had the right to defend his work. Meanwhile, mobs fought their way into Dali’s latest show to buy everything on the walls.

As the Germans occupied France in 1940, Dali left Europe for lavish exile at the St. Regis Hotel in “the most stimulating town in all the world.” His waxed mustaches and rolling eyes became trademarks thanks to photographer Philippe Halsman, who over 30 years contributed as much to the Dalinian image as anyone save Dali himself. His “Dali Atomicus” – with Dali, cats, water, canvas, and chair suspended in midair – was only one of their many collaborations for Life magazine; they even created a book about Dali’s mustache (one hair of which Dali sold to the Beatles for $5,000). Dali freely used his once-revolutionary images (dismembered arms, limp watches, ruined columns, pieces of driftwood, tables with women’s legs, crutches, and ants) to sell Ford automobiles, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Schiaparelli perfume, and Gruen watches. One of the few propositions he refused was opening a chain of Dalicatessens.

In 1970 one writer observed that “forty years after his soft watches dropping over a barren landscape made him famous, Dali is still Everyman’s idea of the mad genius of modern art, and mad genius sells like nothing else.” His passion for money (Surrealist poet Andre Breton had long ago coined an anagram of his name: “Avida Dollars”) led him to produce vast narrative canvases titled “Hallucinogenic Toreador” or “Soft Monster Sleeping” for millionaire collectors. He even signed blank sheets of paper that were eventually used by forgers to produced completely fraudulent Dali prints, neither drawn nor overseen in any way by the artist.

One biographer wrote, “Why bother to create an image? All he had to do was sign a sheet of paper to receive $40.” One aide would slide the paper under his pencil and another would pull it away, permitting the artist to sign one every two seconds. No one knows how many sheets he signed. His American lawyer doubted it was more than 40,000. A former agent once claimed it was as many as 350,000.

New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s affected even Dali, who complained that city life had become “Total decadence! Even the St. Regis is not what it used to be … they have cut out the cherry on the breakfast grapefruit!” He left Manhattan forever in 1980. Devastated by Gala’s death, he had stopped painting long before his death on January 23, 1989.