leer en español        Salvador Dalí was a work of art, his own masterpiece. ‘I work seventeen hours a day,’ he cried. ‘The measure of my genius is the size of the hole I perforate in abstract matter.’He didn’t believe in inspiration. ‘It is the obsession of repetition the Gods take note of.’ Routine was the watchword, and he maintained the same rigid patterns for thirty years.In the summer he spent his days in the house constructed from five modest cottages in Port Lligat, a pretty bay along the coast from Cadaqués. At the end of September, he left for the St Regis Hotel in New York where Gala in her thick Russian accent negotiated contracts. When spring came, the old black Cadillac driven by Arturo Caminada – a fisherman who had learned to drive at the tiller of his boat – arrived loaded with luggage at the Hôtel Meurice in Paris where Dalí and Gala occupied room 108: the Royal Suite where King Alfonso XIII had lived in exile when Spain in 1931 voted for a republic.For three months, ...