Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Hello and thank you for downloading Witness, History as Told by the People Who Were There.

I'm Louis Adaggo, and today we're looking back at the life of the great surrealist Spanish artist, Salvador Dali, who died in January 1989.

I've been talking to Christine Aislet, whose father was one of Dali's publishers, and who as a child spent many summer holidays visiting Dali and his wife Gala in northeast Spain. Mr. Darlie, would you say that you were principally a businessman, a painter, or an entertainer?

No businessman, no painter, but perhaps the only living genius of today.

You know, he used to say I'm a genius he even wrote a wonderful book by the name of

Diary of a genius but it was with a you know with a smile he loved to play with that and play Dali did an artist and a

showman with his trademark moustache twizzled ends pointing skywards,

Darlie strode through the streets of Paris,

with an ant heater on a lead or a car full of cauliflowers,

the very embodiment of surrealism.

While in his art art he created a world of melting clocks and

spindle-legged elephants, lobster telephones and May West lips doubling as a sofa.

Dally had this fabulous imagination and there was always this humorous idea of creating a happening, of deconstructing things. So there was this kind of energy, this momentum

working with Dali which was I think unique.

Christine Arjalet's father, Pierre Arjgelet, first met Dali in Paris in the early 1930s.

At the time my father was a journalist and he came into contact with different artists of the Cyrilis group and very early on he was absolutely

...