O ACCOMPLISH the goal of satisfying what the press release for , the new exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, describes as “two defining, if contradictory, impulses: an immense desire for visibility and the urge to disappear,” the artist had to construct a public persona, a second self, as it were: the outrageous, mustachioed clown who became famous as “Salvador Dalí.” (I add the quotes to separate this persona from Dalí the man and artist.) Dalí’s melting clocks and giraffes on fire appear, to this day, in film, on television, and in advertising, as shorthand for a kind of
