Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí has become synonymous with Surrealism. His soft watches, burning giraffes, and lobster telephones are like a natural language of dreams. But there are many more surprises hidden in his work. Dalí was driven by a willingness to engage with the world: in his exploration of the Catalonian landscape or his reaction to the shock of the atom bomb with paintings whose elements hover side by side like the particles in atoms. He drafted his own “paranoiac-critical method,” explored optical illusions, double images, and stereoscopic paintings, invented the “surrealist object functioning symbolically,” created gorgeous backdrops for his own ballets, and staged himself as a mustache-wielding genius in photographic collaborations. Himself “painting like an angel,” as critics always admitted, in his later years he turned to the inspiration of classical art, updating and subverting Renaissance imagery in large celestial visions, or his final more private homages to Michelangelo and Velázquez. This sweeping overview combines two volumes: a Baby-SUMO-sized book with illustrations of Dalí’s key works in a size and detail never before seen in print, showing every touch of the artist’s exquisite brush. This is accompanied by a chronology volume of year-by-year texts, written by Montse Aguer and Carme Ruiz from the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in the artist’s hometown of Figueres. Reflecting the latest research, they tell the story of art and artist with many quotes from his own writings, letters, and contemporary reviews, illustrated by rare and iconic portrait shots, magazine articles, sketches and book illustrations, as well as additional works in different media. We meet the young Dalí as a precocious but unruly talent, who makes friends with the Catalan avant-garde, becoming inseparable with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. We follow him on his first visit of Paris, to a shy meeting in Picasso’s studio, before in 1929 he becomes known in select circles for his first film with Luis Buñuel. Soon his paintings scandalize not just the bourgeoisie, but hardboiled surrealist avant-gardists with soiled underpants and idols of masturbation. In the same eventful year, Dalí meets his muse Gala, soon inseparable from his own life and vision. We see them moving to America where he becomes a public figure in the media and on society pages, collaborating on theater and fashion projects, growing his inspirational mustache, working in Hollywood with Hitchcock and Disney. We see them return to Spain after the War where they hold court and the artist builds his own legacy in the Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueres. Thirty-five years after his death he still continues to engage and surprise; and forty years after his first TASCHEN monograph, here is a fresh celebration on a grand scale of this titan of modern painting.