The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí

In both his art and his life, Salvador Dalí always courted controversy. Undoubtedly one of the most technically gifted of all the surrealist painters, Dalí was condemned for both his increasingly commercial output from the 1930s onward and his politically naive support for the Franco regime. More recently, Dalí's life and work have undergone something of a reassessment, nowhere more so than in Ian Gibson's magnificent biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. Coming hard on the heels of that work, this book, edited by Haim Finkelstein, adds yet another fascinating dimension to our understanding of this charismatic yet often repulsive enigma of Spanish painting.

Finkelstein's collection is the first comprehensive English translation of Dalí's writing from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. As he points out in his introduction, writing was in fact a vital dimension of Dalí's artistic identity, which is reflected in some truly weird, wonderful, and poetic essays from the 1920s on photography, jazz, and film, including the original shooting script of Un Chien Andalou. What comes across in these early writings is Dalí's enthusiasm for a popular culture that many presumed he regarded with contempt. However, Dalí's intellectual petulance and arrogance are never far away in this collection, and despite the interest of his flirtation with Freud in his "paranoiac-critical writings," the collection soon finds Dalí on all-too-familiar ground: posturing, conservative, and intellectually superficial. Although the writings shed little further light on why Dalí became such a cynical conservative in later life and art, it is interesting to watch how the loss of intellectual curiosity in his prose is reflected in the loss of artistic innovation in his paintings. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí is a fascinating book, a major event, and required reading for Dalí aficionados--and anyone intrigued by one of the flawed geniuses of 20th-century painting. --Jerry Brotton