Dali. BABY SUMO

One of the titans of modern painting, Salvador Dalí is the quintessential surrealist but also a performer, designer, and visionary. This publication presents his work in unprecedented size and detail, accompanied by a chronology following his path from Catalonia through Paris to Hollywood and back, with photos, sketches, and magazine pages. Salvador Dalí has become synonymous with Surrealism. His soft watches, burning giraffes, and lobster telephones are like a natural language of dreams. But there are many more surprises hidden in his work. Dalí was driven by a willingness to engage with the world: in his exploration of the Catalonian landscape or his reaction to the shock of the atom bomb with paintings whose elements hover side by side like the particles in atoms. He drafted his own “paranoiac-critical method,” explored optical illusions, double images, and stereoscopic paintings, invented the “surrealist object functioning symbolically,” created gorgeous backdrops for his own ballets, and staged himself as a mustache-wielding genius in photographic collaborations. Himself “painting like an angel,” as critics always admitted, in his later years he turned to the inspiration of classical art, updating and subverting Renaissance imagery in large celestial visions, or his final more private homages to Michelangelo and Velázquez.