The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali [Anglais] [Relié]

"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 most notorious artists of the 20th century. A self-proclaimed surrealist, an avant-garde exhibitionist, and a criticized commercialist with questionable political affiliations, Dali was anything but benign. Biographer Ian Gibson (Federico Garcia Lorca) argues that the modern master was motivated primarily by the very 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 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 world's most eccentric performers.

Salvador Dali's swan-dive from Surrealist visionary to pathetic self-parody surely constitutes one of this century's great case studies in career suicide. From roughly 1928 to the Spanish Civil War, Dali fused his myriad sexual compulsions and anxieties with a pathological desire to epater le bourgeois, creating a group of first-rate paintings (think limp watches) that withstood all the disasters to follow. Shame was central throughout Dali's career, according to Gibson. His white-hot creative steak of the late 1920s and early 1930s started when his father expelled him from the family for a painting consisting of the phrase "Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother" scrawled over an outline of Jesus Christ. Dali's second and more lasting brush with shame, however, was less productive. He was excommunicated from the Surrealist movement by its "pope," Andre Breton (who anagrammatically dubbed him "Avida Dollars"), for excessive greed and ambivalence toward fascism. After this, Dali sunk as far and as fast as possible, marrying the charismatic but openly promiscuous Gala; treating art as nothing but a cash cow; and engaging in increasingly lame publicity stunts, sycophantic visits to dictators and popes and even a little cruelty to animals. Gibson has made the most of this promising but treacherous material: "Two thirds of this book are devoted to one third of Dali's life," that is, the more productive and less shameful part. Meticulously researched and compulsively readable, Gibson's narrative benefits from sturdy readings of the paintings and an in-depth knowledge of the artist's milieu, partially gained from his work on Lorca (Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life). And while the book's last third may make the reader wince and squirm, this response only demonstrates how effectively the biographer has evoked Dali's shameful decline. There are more than 30 full-color reproductions and illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gibson, noted biographer of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life, LJ 9/15/89), became interested in the life of Surrealist painter Salvador Dali because of the significant friendship between the two famous Spaniards. The resulting biography of Dali shows evidence of copious research but focuses as much on the sexual details of the painter's life as it does on his artwork. Gibson's central thesis is that Dali was motivated largely by sexual shame and selfishness. Scandal, duplicity, conflict, self-aggrandizement, feuds, and shifting alliances make up the bulk of this biography, notable for its decided lack of sympathy toward its subject. Because of Dali's celebrity and the sexual candor of Gibson's account, this work is likely to be widely noticed and discussed. It will also be of some value to scholars and specialists for its diligent research and many footnotes.
-?Kathryn Wekselman, Univ. of Cincinnati Lib., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An evenhanded examination of the long and silly life--1904-89--of the Surrealist who cheapened and squandered his immense talent for an increasingly hollow, mercenary exhibitionism in his later years.

Gibson gives thorough, intelligent attention to Dali's work. It is hard to imagine a more satisfactory life of this very complicated artist.

The author is as good on Dali's art as his life....With luck, there'll be no need to read anything else about Dali for a long time to come.

Ian Gibson ... shows great forbearance as he documents every moment of Dali's life, but finally he cannot spare us the tedium Dali subjects us to as he fashions and refashions his obsessions. It could not have been easy for a biographer to find a way to deal fairly with this significant figure in 20th-century art history when Dali did everything possible in his mature years to tarnish his own name.

"Two thirds of this book are devoted to one third of Dali's life," writes Gibson in the afterword to his new biography of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated--and infamous--artists. Yet the statement by no means implies an incomplete book. Much to the contrary; despite his preference for the surrealist painter's early and middle careers, Gibson has written a breathtakingly comprehensive narrative, describing in full Salvador Dali's life as inspired artist and uninhibited exhibitionist. For Gibson, the two roles are far from separate, both stemming from a profound sense of "shame" --of sex, desire, and unconsummated love--that haunted Dali's creative personality and also gave birth to his outrageous persona. Proof of Gibson's argument comes from various sources, including Dali's correspondence and conversations and his novels, poems, and essays. But in the end, it is the paintings and drawings that provide the most convincing evidence. For, as Gibson writes, "there Dalibrings shame into the open, where it can be scrutinized. No other painter in the history of art has done this, and it may yet transpire that in depicting shame, and forcing us to contemplate its sources and its agonies, Dalimade one of his most important contributions to civilization." The illustration plan, consisting of black-and-white drawings and 30 full-color reproductions, should anchor the 736-page narrative, which is extremely informational and entertaining. Veronica Scrol

In January 1986 Dal summoned Gibson to a meeting at which he exhorted author to make it clear in the forthcoming second volume of his biography of Gabriel Garca Lorca that the poet had loved Dal sexually. The stories Dal told him provided the catalyst for this book. The task of telling Dals life is not easy; the artist was a skilled dissembler who cultivated his myth and wrote an autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, as, Gibson suggests, a means of forestalling ``meddlers.'' Gibson himself is a talented biographer with a detective's soul. He plunges into Dal's correspondence and diaries, exposes their half-truths and falsehoods, and dares to suggest that Dal was driven by a profound sense of shame. In the artist's early years, shame reduced him to furiously blushing agony and made even the most cursory social interactions difficult. Playing out this psychoanalytic theme, Gibson explores the repercussions throughout his life and his art. Sexual anxiety not only shaped the artists's relationshipsincluding those with Lorca and Gala, the artist's wifebut also provided a lexicon of imagery in Dal's wildly inventive Surrealist paintings. Gibson never lets his psychoanalytic interpretation overpower his narrative, however, and skillfully manages to maintain control of the story even as the characters in Dal's life multiply, divide, and become increasingly successful and strange. Wisely, he compresses the latter part of Dal's life, and expends most of his authorial energy on the first third, a period of time in which Dal completed his most original, visually dissonant work and collaborated with both Lorca and Luis Buuel. In spite of his social agonies, Dal's shameif indeed that's what it waspowered some of the most outrageous and compelling paintings of the early 20th century. Mastering vast quantities of information, Gibson succeeds in evoking not only Dal's life, but also the intellectual and aesthetic milieu of a close-knit group of artists and writers whose work shocked the world. (30 color illustrations, b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gibson has written a breathtakingly comprehensive narrative of Dali's life as an inspired artist and an uninhibited exhibitionist....Proving his case with support from Dali's writing, Gibson gives us a surreal ride that cleans up a great painter's act.

[A]n exhaustive study of the tormented artist that may make the reader squirm and wince. [A] vivid and beautifully constructed biography.

That Gibson includes more than 30 color plates--Dali's great works, the exotic favorites, and maudlin later pieces--is a real plus for "Life", as is the fact that the author goes into deep description and analysis of most of the pieces.

For how it deals with Dali's frauds and tricky truths Gibson's work would make Sherlock Holmes proud. He is exhaustive in his singular crusade to ferret out the factual truths about Dali's entire life. A realistic biography such as this about Dali will probably never be duplicated.

The most thorough and ambitious biography of Salvador Dali ever written, a remarkable evocation of the outlandish personality, paranoia, and sexual torment lurking behind 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 Dali's life as artist and as uninhibited exhibitionist, from his wild and troubled youth through his often rollickingly funny adventures in Paris, New York, and Hollywood to his poignant last years. Here is Dali 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 Dali reexamines the roles of the two most important individuals in the artist's life: the Spanish playwright and author Federico Garca Lorca and the enigmatic, libidinous Gala, the Russian migr whose marriage Dali broke up and with whom he subsequently lived in unconsummated bliss and terror. This is a truly incandescent life of the surrealist artist who caught the imagination of the twentieth century. This enthralling narrative is augmented by a full discussion of Dali's most important works, with black-and-white illustrations of Dali's life and paintings reproduced at appropriate points in the text and more than thirty full-color reproductions.

Ian Gibson lives in a village near Granada, Spain. His Federico Garca Lorca: A Life won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was named a Best Book of 1989 by the New York Times and the Boston Globe.