The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

by Salvador Dali, Salvador Dalai, Haakon M Chevalier (Translator)

Overview

This early autobiography, which takes Dalí through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. Superbly illustrated with over eighty photographs of Dalí and his works, and scores of Dalí drawings and sketches.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781161638455
Publisher:	Kessinger Publishing Company
Publication date:	05/23/2010
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) entered the ranks of the Surrealists in 1929 with a series of iconoclastic paintings which fused technical virtuosity with Freudian infantilism, leading to his invention of the "paranoiac-critical" method. Later expelled from the Surrealist Group, he was christened "Avida Dollars" by André Breton whilst acquiring the reputation of master showman and scandalist. His art and writings remain amongst the most unique and important bodies of work of the 20th Century.

Read an Excerpt

"... Le Chien Andalou was the film of adolescence and death which I was going to plunge right into the heart of witty, elegant and intellectualized Paris with all the reality and all the weight of the Iberian dagger, whose hilt is made of the blood-red and petrified soil of our pre-history, and whose blade is made of the inquisitorial flames of the Holy Catholic Inquisition mingled with the canticles of turgescent and red-hot steel of the resurrection of the flesh.

Here is an extract from what Eugenio Montes wrote at the time (1928) about Le Chien Andalou:

Table of Contents

Prologue
PART ONE
I. Anecdotic Self-Potrait
II. Intra-Uterine Memories
III. Birth of Salvador Dali
IV. False Childhood Memories
V. True Childhood Memories
    The Story of the Linden-Blossom Picking and the Crutch
PART TWO
VI. Adolescence; Grasshopper; Explusion from School; End of the European War
VII. "It"; Philosophic Studies; Unfulfilled Love; Technical Experiments; My "Stone Period"; End of Love Affair; Mother's Death"
VIII. Apprenticeship to Glory; Suspension from the School of Fine Arts of Madrid; Dandyism and Prison
IX. Return to Madrid; Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts; Voyage to Paris; Meeting with Gala; Beginnings of the Difficult Idyll of my Sole and Only Love Story; I am Disowned by my Family
    Tale of the Wax Manikin with the Sugar Nose
PART THREE
X. Beginnings in Society; Crutches; Aristocracy; Hôtel du Château in Carry-le Rouet; Lydia; Port Lligat; Inventions; Malaga; Poverty; L'Age d'Or
XI. "My Battle; My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution; "Surrealist Object" versus "Narrated Dream"; Critical-Paranoiac Activity versus Automatism"
XII. "Glory Between the Teeth, Anguish Between the Legs; Gala Discovers and Inspires the Classicism of my Soul"
XIII. Metamorphosis; Death; Resurrection
XIV. Florence; Munich; Monte Carlo; Bonwit Teller; New European War; Battle Between Mlle. Chanel and M. Clavet; Return to Spain; Lisbon; Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought; Cosmogony; Perennial Victory of the Acanthus Leaf; Renaissance
Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

Slightly altered reprint of the Viking Press edition of 1942. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"Dali's paintings reveal in the most powerful form the basic elements of the Surrealist imagination: a series of equations for dealing with the extraordinary transformations of our age. Let us salute this unique genius." — JG Ballard

From the Publisher