Salvador Dali: Portfolio

Synopsis

This stunning Taschen Portfolio features 14 full-color frame-able prints by the great surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.

"Every morning when I awake," said the painter of Soft Watches (later retitled The Persistence of Memory), "the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí..." The native Catalonian was obsessed with both money and fame; painting and speaking were his main occupations, his favorite subject--how to discover one's genius. Not exactly loved by the Surrealists, who criticized him for extravagance and his addiction to money (it was Andre Breton who came up with the anagram "Avida Dollars"), Dalí's paranoiac-critical method nonetheless provided them with a first-rate instrument to liberate intelligence and imagination from the bonds of memory and dream.

Had he been born during the Renaissance, his genius would have met with greater acceptance than was the case in our era, which saw him as a constant source of provocation; he, for his part, described the era as "degenerate." Dalí commented: "the only difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad," remarking pithily that "The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist." Dalí decodes the fantasies and symbols of his Surrealist visions, penetrating the depths of the irrational and subconscious, elevating hard and soft to the level of aesthetic principles. He and Gala, his wife and muse, are mythical couple, she his "existential double," his "perpetuation in immortal memory." At age three, Dalí had wanted to become a cook, aged five Napoleon. Thereafter, he continually aspired to something higher--to be divineDalí forever...