From Publishers Weekly
The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which had its origins in the collection of A. Reynolds Morse and Eleanor R. Morse, houses works that span Dali's (1904-1989) career, from the accomplished drawings and paintings of his youth to the surrealist paintings for which he gained fame and notoriety. In this slim volume, 40 of the museum's paintings are exquisitely reproduced in full color and accompanied by brief commentaries in which art historian Wach discusses their psychological content and their place in Dali's oeuvre. Wach's introduction, which doesn't treat Dali's work in depth but presents a readable overview of his career, outlines Dali's life and development as an artist, emphasizing his debt to Freud, the influence of his wife, Gala Eluard, his relationship to other surrealists and the sources of his complex imagery and iconography. A number of Dali's drawings are included in the introduction, and there is an extensive chronology of the artist's life and a bibliography. Wach teaches at the University of Melbourne. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Beyond the melting clocks and distorted bodies the world instantly recognizes as the work of Dal￯﾿ﾽ is a tremendous body of work. Forty masterpieces by the eccentric surrealist painter are presented here with insightful commentary by art historian Kenneth Wach. Chosen from the collection of the Salvador Dal￯﾿ﾽ Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and reproduced in vivid color, each work is examined through the lens of the early 20th-century developments that shaped Dal￯﾿ﾽ and his vision of the modern world.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, houses the most comprehensive collection in the world of the art of Salvador Dali (1904-1989), the renowned Surrealist painter. From the Museum's extensive holdings, forty masterpieces have been selected for this volume by the art historian Kenneth Wach. All forty are reproduced in color, as full-page plates. For each, Mr. Wach has written an illuminating commentary, discussing both the works' style, in art-historical terms, and their often complex psychological content. In addition, the book's general introduction provides a broad overview of Dali's flamboyant career as an artist. It traces the course of Dali's development from his first childhood efforts in Catalonia to his participation in the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, to his sojourn in the United States during World War II and his late works executed in Spain. Among the famous images included here are luminous still lifes from Dali's youth, which show his debts to the Old Masters. There are also a number of his remarkable Surrealist beach scenes, with their mysterious vistas and obsessive sexuality. Several troubled depictions of the distorted human body, dating from the difficult period of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, culminate in the expectant Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man. The volume features as well some prime examples of Dali's later "nuclear mysticism," where traditional religious iconography is joined with motifs taken from modern physics. Notable among the later works is The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, a radical reinterpretation of his celebrated earlier painting with limp watches, now reconceived in terms of Albert Einstein's theories of space and time. In scale, the works reproduced as colorplates range from Dali's epic, mural-size canvas The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus to a small, subtly rendered for his Christ of St. John of the Cross.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly