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Perhaps the most important imaginative relationships in young Dali's life were with people, not paintings: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the future filmmaker Luis Bunuel. United in their loathing of bourgeois convention -- Dali and Lorca coined the term putrefact for any stale idea or piece of kitsch that offended their nostrils -- the three were, in fact, very different creatures. Bunuel never lost his anarchic iconoclasm, whereas middle age ended Dali's; but the films they made together (An Andalusian Dog, 1929, and The Golden Age, 1930) remain classics of provocation. For a few years, Lorca and Dali found themselves in a trance of mutually reinforcing narcissism. "The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and 'in the raw,' " Dali wrote of Lorca, "presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone, confused, blood- red, viscous and sublime." This was understatement compared with the fervid sexual passion Lorca felt for Dali. Dali, who fanatically denied his own homosexual urges, did not respond to Lorca's passes -- though, he characteristically remarked, "I was very flattered from the point of view of my own prestige."
The crystalline and extravagant beauty of Lorca's imagery helped release similar qualities in Dali's work; above all, it was the poet's baroque character, his preoccupation with death, sex and the morbidity of flesh, that encouraged the younger artist's imagination. The mark Lorca left on Dali's art was not its modernity but its extreme Spanishness. But that, too, is why Dali's best work has lasted.