The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí

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Description

The most thorough and ambitious biography of Salvador Dalí ever written, a remarkable evocation of the outlandish personality, paranoia, and sexual torment lurking at the back of the nightmarish images that shook the world.

Drawing on extensive original research and recently discovered sources, Ian Gibson presents a daringly original portrait of one of this century’s most celebrated―and infamous―artists. He provides a full narrative of Dalí’s life as artist and as uninhibited exhibitionist, from his wild and troubled youth through his ceaselessly rollickingly funny adventures in Paris, New York, and Hollywood to his poignant last years. Here is Dalí fully revealed through his voluminous correspondence; his novel, poems, and essays; and interviews with some of those closest to him. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí reexamines the roles of the two most important individuals in the artist’s life: the Spanish playwright and creator Federico García Lorca and the enigmatic, libidinous Gala, the Russian émigré whose marriage Dalí broke up and with whom he therefore lived in unconsummated bliss and terror. This can be a in point of fact incandescent life of the surrealist artist who caught the imagination of the twentieth century.
“The world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a great genius, I’m certain of it.”

At 16, Salvador Dali had already developed the remarkable ego and uncanny perception that would distinguish him as one of the crucial notorious artists of the 20th century. A self-proclaimed surrealist, an avant-garde exhibitionist, and a criticized commercialist with questionable political affiliations, Dali was once anything but benign. Biographer Ian Gibson (Federico Garcia Lorca) argues that the modern master was once motivated primarily by the last thing anyone would suspect him of: a very deep sense of shame. Via the artist’s correspondence, diary, and autobiography (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali), Gibson meticulously stitches together the wild characters and deep-dish details of Dali’s life: a guilt-ridden childhood, feelings of sexual inadequacy (“…I discovered that my penis was once small, pitiful and soft”), his love affairs with Lorca and sex-pot Gala and the real passion of his life, surrealism. Critical, fair, and lively, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali digs beyond the escapades and outlandish façade to expose the very personal and vulnerable side of one of the most world’s most eccentric performers.

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