Many years ago I found myself in Venice having lunch with Peggy Guggenheim. It was a fine spring morning and there were sixteen of us, seated at a huge glass table. Peggy herself was enthroned at one end, surrounded by a cluster of incredibly handsome young Italian waiters whose sole job, it would seem, was
to repeatedly fill her glass - with gin. We drank wine and were served a cold buffet lunch off huge plates, hand-painted by Picasso.

The villa itself, on the banks of the Grand Canal, was quite large but modern and clearly unfinished - a squat, white bungalow rather than a sumptuous Renaissance palace. The walls of her salon were lined with priceless paintings - Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many other great Modernists. Close to where I sat and within reach (yes, I touched it, surreptitiously) was what I later discovered to be a Max Ernst masterpiece - The Robing of the Bride (1940).

I was so struck by this magisterial painting that I resolved, there and then, to call myself a ‘Surrealist’.
In the many decades since that moment I have been trying, in my own way, to justify that claim!