Text by Montse Aguer TeixidorDocumentation and Research by Carme Ruiz González and Teresa Moner Rubio
Translated by Chris Miller
London: Tate Publishing, 2007 [2005]
$39.95/Softcover
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech (1904-1989) was an iconoclast, something of an ideological turncoat, a certifiable (though initially self-proclaimed) genius. The great exploits of his life are well-known, persisting in popular memory because of their audacity. His painting, a curious and sustained mixture of classical precision with bizarre spatializations and imagination, remains the best-loved, in some ways most accessible work of the surrealist movement. Dalí famously collaborated with fellow Spaniard and filmmaker Luis Buñuel on two of the seminal works of silent, avant-garde cinema Un chien andalou (1929) and L’age d’or (1930), both tenacious staples of film studies curricula the world over. Dalí was not content, however, to let his work overshadow his personal antics. In a not wholly aberrant episode, Dalí attended one part of the 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London in full diving gear. He attempted to lecture, but almost killed himself by suffocation. Often, his attempts at outrage superseded personal comfort. Unlike many artists (in general, but also of the 20th century in particular), Dalí came to be fully appreciated in his lifetime. He lived in exile in the United States during World War II, where he came to know wealthy collectors, important cultural figures (Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney among them), and found much lucrative work on commercial commissions. The man who once pledged himself to communism and an on-going surrealist revolution—perhaps just in an attempt to stay part of the Parisian surrealist group proper—came to be one of the richest artists in the world (96-97).
One of the main virtues of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life, which was originally assembled by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to accompany massive exhibitions of Dalí’s work, is its staggering scope. The book presents more than just the familiar paintings or famous film-stills. The second half of the book provides pictures of nearly all of Dalí’s commercial work—illustrations, concept collages for magazine covers, magazine articles, advertisement designs, pictures of scene designs for opera, and beyond—making this book an absolute must for those interested in a full picture of the mysterious man of the 20th century. Because of the massive amount of visual matter in this volume, consistent pre-occupations emerge. Dalí’s wife Gala was a constant muse, to a much larger degree than can be understood by only considering his famous paintings (though she does appear, often idealized, in work throughout his lifetime, and her death could arguably mark the point at which he gives up painting altogether). After his famous days as a core surrealist, he branched his ideas into new realms: a renewed belief in Christianity (he even had audiences with the Pope) combined with a personal mysticism that held Gala as the symbol of all women and attempted to reconcile arbitrary personal whimsy with advances in physics and molecular science. It sounds complicated because it is.
In his early autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the tone of Dalí’s thoughts, art, and place-in-the-world fit into place. Facts, actual life events, artistic views, lies, momentary fancies, and obsessions are stuffed into the psychoanalytic blender. What emerges is truthful in that it doesn’t pretend to be. Dalí’s aesthetics, and the way in which he treats his own life, expose the main contradiction of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life. The book is wholly chronological and seems to cover Dalí’s life in as precise a way as it can, sometimes listing daily or weekly events. The overall tone of the book is “objective” (as possible as that can be for the most subjective man in history) and archival. Thus, the text is presented as short paragraph descriptions that accompany Dalí’s work. Some whole magazine articles are translated and presented (in fact, these are a real treasure and represent one of the main reasons to buy this book), and these interrupt the flow of his life’s events. Otherwise, the book is a kind of chronicle or almanac of Dalí.
For that reason, Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life is not the best place to start with Dalí. It is an invaluable reference and would make a great codex to accompany the artist’s own, decidedly fanciful work. It would even be a great adjunct to some of the large volumes of criticism and art historical interpretation of Dalí’s paintings. Having read the thing cover-to-cover, I am most impressed by the montage of images that constructed Dalí’s legacy. More than just the man who painted The Persistence of Memory, Dalí was somebody who contributed to the everyday visual culture of Americans and Europeans. It may come as a surprise, but during his lifetime, the melting clocks were arguably as important to the lived experience of Westerns as were his articles for Harper’s or his haute culture fashion designs. He created for companies to aid in selling wares—always in imaginative ways—worked with media as diverse as human bodies (living, though composed to create the illusion of a human skull) and gilded diamonds (to design a piece of jewelry of unimaginable worth), and sometimes managed to work purely for himself. He had more unrealized projects in film and theatre than most of us have had hot meals. He was a true 20th century original.
