Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the most famous and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Although he was prolific for more than sixty years--creating 1,200 oil paintings and countless drawings, sculptures, theatre and fashion designs, book illustrations, and writings--the nearly universal current critical judgment is that his work reached its zenith in the early 1930s, when he was affiliated with the Surrealist movement. The forty years of work executed after 1940--the bulk of his oeuvre--is often seen as repetitious, reactionary, and overly commercialized. Such criticisms mainly arose from his 1941 reinvention of himself as a "classicist," his embrace of Catholicism, and his support for General Franco--postures that distanced him from notions of modernism and the avant-garde. This handsomely illustrated volume focuses on Dali's output after 1940, which drew inspiration from both the Old Masters and the contemporary world. Beginning in the late 1930s with the transition from Dali's well-known Surrealist canvases to the classicism he announced in 1941, the volume traces the artist's development of "nuclear mysticism" in the 1950s, his enduring interest in science, optical effects, and illusionism, his commercial ventures (which predate and inspired such efforts by Andy Warhol), his collaborations with photographer Philippe Halsman (and his brief forays into Hollywood), and visits the two major repositories of his work--the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. --Book Jacket.