Salvador Dali asked this legendary artist to paint his portrait and he refused. This artist DESPISED Dali for these reasons...

The legendary artist Anthony Christian had serious personal conflicts with Dali and Picasso.

He led the erotic art movement with masterpieces such as this one:

He painted this at the age of 10:

When he painted this, it was met with great uproar and controversy:

Anthony Christian was consequently blacklisted for not just his erotica but also because he whistle blew on the whole art auction process (Sotheby's, Christie's etc) which he considered corrupt and manipulative, turning down potentially millions of pounds in sales. He ended up making millions anyway without the auction process from the sheer power of his art which ended up on the walls of kings and queens and legendary families such as the Forbes family.

Here is one of his countless fascinating stories involving Salvador Dali. In Anthony Christian's own words:

I did not like this man at all. Greatest artist in the world? Surely not, I told myself, believing that to be a great artist one had to be at least a good man, if not great.

However, when Mafalda managed to fight her way through the ladies and their gold, Dali’s avarice and the ladies’ adulation, and show him the photographs of my work, it did help slightly to hear him say, “Oh, I like these drawings very much. Antonio, you know how to draw my friend!” In fact I softened my attitude towards him quite considerably, telling myself it was more the fault of these idiot women to be so fawning than it was his for not resisting. I was further softened by his almost whispering under his breath and quite quickly, as if he didn’t want Mafalda to hear, “Come and see me tomorrow morning at eleven and we will talk about art,” and then he returned to being the clown, who could hardly get such an intelligent sentence out of his mouth as the one he had just passed on to me. And so I made polite excuses, especially to Mafalda, and left him to be gobbled up by those very old, very ugly – very rich – adoring Park Avenue ladies.

The next morning I got somewhat more than I bargained for. We met in the cafe/restaurant again, and Dali seemed pleased to see me; happily no one else was present. For half an hour or so he did in fact talk lucidly and with intelligence, even telling me some things I would remember as advice many years later. He told me that the best way to become rich in New York, and in fact the way he had achieved it himself, was to “syndicate the work.” He had found ten people, he continued, who guaranteed to buy one painting a year from him for three years, for ten thousand dollars each. “In those days that made me a rich man,” he continued. “And I was guaranteed to be rich for three years. But I wanted it for ever so do you know what I did? I spent sixty percent of that gold on publicity,” he finished with something of a flourish. I came to notice he never used the word money but always gold, he loved gold. “And so all that gold made me so famous that by the end of three years my painting is worth many times more than those ten thousand dollars that those people had given me.” He spoke excellent English but constantly changed tenses around incorrectly, as I am sure I do myself when speaking other languages. He finished by telling me, very proudly, that none of the people who had each bought three paintings from him over three years would sell one of their works. “When you have Dali,” he said, adopting the clown again and making me pessimistic about what was to come, “you do not sell him!” and he burst out laughing. “And the other thing you must do, Antonio,” he continued, “Is make sure you are noticed!” and he twirled his moustache, as if that proved what he had said was right.

During that half hour or so, Dali had remained relatively normal, inasmuch as his conversation continued in a coherent and even intelligent manner, which when he had been talking to the ladies the day before it had hardly been at all. To my surprise, the subject quickly turned to sex. He had asked when I was born, and told me that because I was a Scorpio artist he knew I liked sex. But so did he, he continued, and by watching it, painting it, “being in it but never having it!” he claimed he enjoyed it more than anyone else alive. “Dali is impotent,” he said, “but Dali is the most erotic man alive! My wife, my Gala, she always tells me this!” He continued by telling me how much he loved the expression on the face of a woman in orgasm. “All the old masters loved this as I do, and then painted halos on the girls and called them Madonnas,” he said, “But they were really only the lovers of the artists, in orgasm.” He told me he had made a photographic collage of many girls coming but wished he had painted it. “So much work still to do,” he said, in the only unselfconscious, reflective moment I ever saw him in. Suddenly he jumped up and gestured for me to follow him. “Come,” he said, “I will show you secret Dali,” and I followed him out of the restaurant, deeper into the hotel. He seemed to know his way around as if it were his own home, and as we passed through several corridors, anyone we passed seemed to bow their heads slightly with respect for the man they recognized with his mad moustache, and I delighted in the Dorchester-like smell of the carpets, the smell of money. Or gold, as Dali would have it.

We arrived at a door which Dali simply opened and entered. He didn’t knock, and I supposed all this must have been prearranged. “When I pass through this door,” he said very quietly, almost reverently, “I always feel I am secretly entering my Gala; it is our sex, that the world doesn’t have to know about who all know so much Dali!”

We were in a small, luxurious suite, I had the impression of just two or three rooms and an en suite bathroom. Dali gestured me into the bedroom where, on a large double bed, lying on the covers was a girl who I guessed to be in her early twenties. She was wearing a white gown that made me think she might be a chambermaid, and I was surprised by her beauty, she was lovely like the girl I had seen in the striptease club in London years before. Dali gestured to me to sit down on one of the two chairs that had been strategically placed at the foot of the bed, and as soon as we were seated, he took a tiny camera out of his pocket and the girl slipped out of her gown showing she was wearing nothing underneath it. Her body was lovely and very similar to Susan’s, except she had larger breasts. Also her skin was a tone or two darker than Susan’s, giving me the impression she might be Puerto Rican or Mexican, even Spanish like Dali. She started caressing herself and I was hypnotized.

From her breasts to her stomach and after two or three minutes down to her sex, the girl caressed herself very sensually. Dali was clicking away on his little camera which didn’t seem to disturb the girl at all – he took so many pictures I even wondered if he really had a film in his camera or just did it as he felt it added to the erotic excitement – my heart was pounding in my chest with the unexpectedness of it all, and I confess my lower half wasn’t sleeping either. As the girl’s evident excitement mounted, so I found the whole thing more beautiful. She seemed to enter a world completely her own as she came closer to her climax, and when she finally came, after an indeterminate ten minutes that were timeless and could have been an hour, it was one of the most beautiful and erotic sights I had ever seen, as her body bucked and rolled into itself for minutes as she crossed, passed, and came down from the world of Venus she had surely entered.

Dali leaned over towards me and whispered. “Now Scorpio Antonio, go and sniff her and tell me if Dali really got his gold worth.” I was astonished by his request, but at least I was quick in understanding his meaning. He had obviously paid this girl to come and perform, but now she had performed he wanted to be sure she had really come, as he felt only then would he have got his money’s worth. I can almost promise you that, if anyone ever reads this, they, like me, would have so loved that performance and so believed in its authenticity, doubts on any level would not have entered their minds. Even had she been “faking it,” and I was sure she hadn’t been, she had done so with such grace, such beauty and with such pure eroticism, no matter what Dali had paid her – I later found out he had given her two hundred dollars – she had more than earned it.

On the other hand I had to think very quickly. This was Salvador Dali and perhaps he really was not like most other people, and to him he had not paid for the beauty I had witnessed, or even the sexiness, after all he never stopped telling one and all he was impotent, and so perhaps his mind worked in such a dry way he felt he was paying only for an orgasm he knew, or claimed, he couldn’t have or cause himself. Having had plenty of time to consider it since, I have to confess my Scorpio character might well have played a part in my complying with Dali’s request. After all, to say that I had been excited would be putting it mildly, and the smell of a girl’s sex either before during or after sex was to me the perfume of another world, and one that called me to it like the Sirens called to Ulysses.

The girl was lying on her side, rolled up. But as soon as I stood up she seemed to know exactly what I was going to do and to my everlasting delight I silently blessed her as she rolled over on her back and spread her thighs for me to perform this little ritual, asked of me by Dali who clicked away on his little camera busily as my nose reached to within a centimetre of that glorious sight and smell. I assured him he had “got his money’s worth.” As I turned to leave, he whispered again, “You, artist Scorpio, you come back tomorrow at the same time; Dali show you more.”

The next day was enough of a repetition of the first to render it not worth going into detail, as I have no intention of writing a sex book and only describe any sexual scenario when it is essential to my story. This time though it was with two girls making love together, which culminated in their licking one another to an orgasm twice as dramatic, noisy and wonderful as the single girl of the day before, who resembled each of these two girls sufficiently for me to think more than ever they were hotel staff, probably chamber maids. As the whole point of writing these memories is to be as honest as my memory will allow, I have to admit I would possibly have been a little disappointed had Dali not wished for assurance of having got his gold’s worth. To have the opportunity of being that close to those wonderful flowers dripping with lust-rain was one of those treasured memories that sits in a very special chest at the bottom of my sea. One of the girls was cheeky enough to try to push herself onto my nose, and so I was grinning from ear to ear as I informed Dali he had truly got value for his gold. As I was leaving, he said “Scorpio Antonio, I want you to make my portrait. Draw me. Come tomorrow at seven o’clock.” I asked if he really believed he would be up at seven, myself having been an early riser all my life. “No,” he said, widening his eyes in mock horror. “In the evening!”

I went to the St. Regis the following evening with my folder of tinted papers tucked under my arm, my pencils in my pocket. Dali was in the bar, where he had told me to meet him; I imagined he would then take me to one of the innumerable secret rooms I was sure now he must have available for his every need, but he didn’t, he ushered me to a chair in the corner of the room. Ah, I thought, he’s trying to make things difficult for me by doing this in public, he must not have absorbed Mafalda’s telling him about my National Gallery experience, that would make working in front of a public of any size of no consequence to me whatsoever. Once the model sat before me and I took out my pencil, there was no world save for the one between the model the paper and me. And so I started preparing to draw, opening my folder to choose a sheet of paper. But instead of sitting down, Dali wandered off and started attracting as much attention as possible by dancing around in the middle of the bar.

I waited two or three minutes to see if he would tire of this really cheap exhibitionism and return to his seat opposite me, so that we could get on with the drawing, but he didn’t, he just kept prancing around making a complete idiot of himself. The audience seemed divided between those who looked at him with adulation and those who looked on in contempt. I closed my folder and stood up, walking over to him and asking if he was going to model. “Dali dance, you draw!” came his reply. Because of what I felt we had shared, I had fallen into the trap of trusting him, losing my sense of general contempt towards him for his prima donna ways and insatiable greed. All of which added up, to me, as contempt for his own art, or gift of being an artist, even further convincing me that he was after all just another sham, the result only of publicity. It was many years before I had reason to believe differently. I turned on my heel and left.

By the time I returned home I was very angry indeed. How could any artist treat another artist like that? Especially after we had shared such private moments of beauty-worship together. Was it not bad enough that people like Ashton Hawkins treated me like shit? Did another artist have to do the same thing? Susan watched as I wound myself up into a fury. She was all sympathy, but my anger just would not abate. And then suddenly I got an idea. Alright, I said, if Dali wanted a portrait I would give him one.

I went and sat before the mirror we had leaning against a window. I managed to arrange the lighting well enough to be able to see myself and my paper, and over the next hour or so I drew myself, looking as angry as I could muster. Of course, by the time I had completed it, I was so happy with my drawing I didn’t really feel so angry any more, but still I had not finished. I added my hand, held towards the viewer with that ridiculous moustache springing from my fingers, that were making the “fuck you” gesture with a V sign. I felt better with every line, and even started laughing. Susan was in seventh heaven, seeing both my pleasure and what we both considered a masterpiece being born. I was almost finished now.

I had discovered when studying Leonardo in my early years that, like him, I could automatically write backwards in what is called mirror-script. Feeling that was aesthetically essential, I then wrote a poem down the side of the page, as the words and lines came to me. From then on I found that whenever I was intensely moved, either by anger or by love, lines would come to me in rhyme, at the same speed as I would normally write prose. I didn’t have to scribble lines or words down and then work on them later, I just wrote directly onto my paper which, tinted in the manner I used, made any erasing impossible. After perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes, at last I was satisfied.

Written down the side of the drawing titled “Self Portrait to Salvador Dali” is this poem:

There but for the grace of God goes God,
Past reason's limits watch him plod
With hairy gimmicks, velvet collars
Gathers more investors' dollars.
Dubious of his own agender
Surrounds himself with Regis splendour
Hey want to meet an old excreto?
Come and talk to Dalyito.

"Ah me,” cries he "I’m impotente
That's why I need so many gente
To lick my arse and then on payday
Make it for me a Dali hayday".

Towards an end so empty now
I've seen him this old grazing cow
Weary , heavy like a cornflake
A sugared ego, what a headache!

With good intention and this sheet
One March evening I went to meet
The man who smiles like the pigs in the sty
The one who snides with open eye -
And so in my anger and in my time
I send to him this backward rhyme.

One of the first things I had done after arriving in New York was find a good photographer who had the equipment and the skill to photograph my drawings and paintings. I took him my drawing the next morning and by four o’clock that afternoon had a beautiful twelve by ten inch black and white print of it. I took it to the St. Regis thinking I would leave it with the concierge as I didn’t really expect to see Dali, but sure enough there he was. He was standing talking to someone in the foyer, to whom he said something that made them both laugh as soon as he saw me, and then he came over to me. “Ah, Antonio!” he called out. “The artist Scorpio who will not make my portrait!” I was still just angry enough not to be seduced by his apparent warm reception of me, as I took out the photograph of my drawing. “Well,” I said, “I might not have drawn you, but I have drawn myself showing how angry I was to be treated badly by another artist.” I handed him the photo. “But this is wonderful,” said Dali, “Dali buy it.” He could have no idea how much his manner irritated me back to being really angry with him. “You can’t do that,” I replied, “As it is not for sale.” “Everything is for sale,” came his retort. “Dali give you gold!”

Perhaps I was a little pompous, but he really went against everything in me that loved and admired the great masters who so called me to join them, not only in craft and beauty but in integrity. And Dali’s behaviour was the absolute opposite of any noble thought or search for quality, and so I said, “Not everything is for sale Dali, and I pray to God I never will be,” and again I turned on my heel and walked out. Yes, I see now, very pompous, but I felt completely satisfied, and all the anger dissipated. That was the last time I ever saw Dali and I rarely even gave him a thought, until I met “That other Spaniard,” as he and Picasso used to refer to one another. But thanks to him and how he was, or wished to appear to the world, I did have some extraordinary memories and a beautiful drawing to show for it all.

Some of Anthony Christian's other masterpieces: