Dalí
The Centenary Retrospective
Dawn Ades
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| ‘The best book yet on a man despised more than he is revered by art historians … With 78 pages of scrupulous chronology illuminated by photographs, this is, as well a disciplined biography. I can pay it no greater compliment than to describe this as a useful book – useful enough to make all others on Dalí virtually superfluous’ | | – Brian Sewell, The Evening Standard |
This is an opportunity to reassess Dali’s work as a whole and to explore, in greater depth than ever before, his so-called ‘late work’ as well as the early and surrealist periods.
The density and originality of Dali's paintings become ever more striking as time goes on, but should not be hived off from his other activities: writer, poet, printmaker, sculptor, filmmaker, inventor of objects, theatre designer and curator of exhibitions. Dalí made the two last great mysteries of his life his subject: the human mind and the structure of the physical universe.
Very few artists have been able to sustain the range of activities he undertook and it is not just as a painter that he will be remembered. His writings are now seen not just as ancillary to his paintings but as major texts. These are part of a continuous flow of ideas, optimism and ambition for which ‘success’ was an irrelevant or ambiguous concept.
Dawn Ades is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Among her other books are Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978) and Surrealist Art (1997), as well as Photomontage, Marcel Duchamp and Dalí in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series.
Also of interest:
by Dawn Ades
Marcel Duchamp by Dawn Ades
A Boatload of Madmen:
Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 |
|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500093245 | | ISBN-13 978-0500093245 | | | | 29.7 x 21.0 cm | | Hardback | | 608pp | | 640 illustrations, 370 in colour | | First published 2004 | | | | £45.00 | | | |  | | | | 
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