By Salvador Dali
Painter, fashion designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) used to be the most colourful and arguable figures in 20th-century artwork. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was once either praised and reviled for the unconscious imagery he projected into his work, which he occasionally known as «hand-painted dream photographs.»
This early autobiography, which takes him via his overdue thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his paintings. it's beautifully illustrated with over eighty pictures of Dalí and his works, and ratings of Dalí drawings and sketches. On its first book, the reviewer of Books saw: «It is very unlikely to not respect this painter as author. As a complete, he . . . communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in brief the concept that of existence and the entire photo of himself he units out to portray.»
Dalís flamboyant self-portrait starts off along with his earliest memories and ends on the top of his earliest successes. His tantalizing bankruptcy titles and headnotes — between them «Intra-Uterine Memories,» «Apprenticeship to Glory,» «Permanent Expulsion from the varsity of excellent Arts,» «Dandyism and Prison,» «I am Disowned through my Family,» «My Participation and my place within the Surrealist Revolution,» and «Discovery of the equipment for Photographing proposal» — in simple terms trace on the compelling revelations to come.
Here are attention-grabbing glimpses of the intense, formidable, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater units, store interiors, and jewellery as with ease as he made surrealistic work and movies. this is the brain which can envision and create with nice technical virtuosity pictures of serene Raphaelesque good looks one second and nightmarish landscapes of soppy watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the following. For somebody attracted to 20th-century artwork and one in all its so much proficient and charismatic figures, the key lifetime of Salvador Dalí is needs to analyzing.
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Additional resources for The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
Example text
With a lightning movement I picked up the bat, crawling with ants, and lifted it to my mouth, moved by an insurmountable feeling of pity; but instead of kissing it, as I thought I was going to, I gave it such a vigorous bite with my jaws that it seemed to me I almost split it in two. Shuddering with repugnance I flung the bat into the wash-house and fled. The opalescent water in the wash-house was bestrewn with black over-ripe figs that had fallen from a large fig-tree shading it. When I went back to within a few feet of there, my eyes filled with tears.
The desire constantly, systematically and at any cost to do just the opposite of what everybody else did pushed me to extravagances that soon became notorious in artistic circles. In the painting class we had the assignment to paint a Gothic statue of the Virgin directly from a model. Before going out the professor had repeatedly emphasized that we were to paint exactly what we “saw”. Immediately, in a dizzy frenzy of mystification, I went to work furtively painting, in the minutest detail, a pair of scales which I copied out of a catalogue.
I therefore opened the magazine at the page of my text, begging him to read it if he had time. Freud continued to stare at me without paying the slightest attention to my magazine. Trying to interest him, I explained that it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent. Then, continuing to stare at me with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge, Freud exclaimed, addressing Stefan Zweig, “I have never seen a more complete example of a Spaniard.