More than 100 Salvador Dali works coming to Singapore for sale

They will be part of a show brought here by the daughter of his long-time collaborator

- Clement Yong

A simple shirt, shorts and slippers - this could be the outfit of any Singaporean man, but it is also what Ms Christine Argillet describes as the unexpected uniform of one of the greatest artists in world history: the larger-than-life surrealist Salvador Dali.

Once photographed walking his pet giant anteater in Paris, the eccentric Dali was really an “extremely simple, kind and elegant” man, according to Ms Argillet, who spent many youthful summers with the artist at his home in Figueres in northeastern Spain in the 1960s.

Normally as shy as his moustache was long, Dali dutifully flicked on his studio lights daily to labour at his art from 6am, sometimes for 10 straight hours. But evening brought out a different beast - the raconteur. Dilating his eyes wide as is his wont in his iconic self-portraits, he told frenzied stories that leapt from premise to premise, impossible but somehow always landing well “because he was so well read”.

Ms Argillet, 70, says over an online call: “He had created this fabulous persona that created buzz, but at the same time was sometimes a bit ridiculous. This somebody else was not exactly himself.

“When there were people he didn’t know, he would overdo it. Sometimes, my father was furious because he would say, ‘People see Dali as a clown.”

Ms Argillet’s father, publisher Pierre Argillet, was a longtime collaborator of Dali from the 1930s to the 1970s, and uprooted their lives two months a year from France to Spain every summer from when she was six years old.

This privileged intimacy with one of Europe’s most formidable celebrities was born in part out of justified suspicion. Her father needed to keep an eye on his unpredictable creative partner, who sometimes sold the illustrations he was preparing for him before the father-daughter duo arrived.