Salvador Dali the Magician 2007 Calendar
Salvador Dali the Magician 2007 Calendar
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High quality art print by Salvador Dali measuring 38×61cm
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The Collected Writings of Salvador Dal? In both his art and his life, Salvador Dali always courted controversy. Undoubtedly one of the most technically gifted of all the Surrealist painters, Dali was condemned for both his increasingly commercial output from the 1930s onward, and his politically naive support for the Franco regime. More recently, Dali’s life and work have undergone something of a reassessment, nowhere more so than in Ian Gibson’s magnificent biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. Coming hard on the heels of this work, Haim Finkelstein’s detailed and comprehensive The Collected Writings of Salvador Dali adds yet another fascinating dimension to our understanding of this charismatic yet often repulsive enigma of Spanish painting.
Finkelstein’s collection is the first comprehensive English translation of Dali’s writing from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. As he points out in his introduction, writing was in fact a vital dimension of Dali’s artistic identity, which is reflected in some truly weird, wonderful, and poetic essays from the 1920s on photography, jazz, and film, including the original shooting script of Un Chien Andalou. What comes across in these early writings is Dali’s enthusiasm for a popular culture which many presumed he regarded with contempt.
However, Dali’s intellectual petulance and arrogance are never far away in this collection, and despite the interest of his flirtation with Freud in his “paranoiac- critical writings”, the collection soon finds Dali on all-too familiar ground; posturing, conservative, and intellectually superficial. Although the writings shed little further light on why Dali became such a cynical conservative in later life and art, it is interesting to watch how the loss of intellectual curiosity in his prose is reflected in the loss of artistic innovation in his paintings. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dali is a fascinating book, a major event, and required reading for Dali aficionados, and anyone intrigued by one of the flawed geniuses of 20th-century painting. Jerry Brotton
