Salvador Dalí (19041989) was one of the most famous and controversial artists of the 20th century. Although he was prolific for more than sixty yearscreating 1,200 oil paintings, countless
drawings, sculptures, theatre and fashion designs, book illustrations, and numerous writingsthe nearly universal current critical judgment is that his work reached its zenith in the early
1930s, when he was affiliated with the Surrealist movement. The forty years of work executed after 1940the bulk of his oeuvreis often seen as repetitious, reactionary, and overly
commercialized. Such criticisms mainly arose from his 1941 reinvention of himself as a classicist,” his embrace of Catholicism, and his support for General Francopostures that distanced him
from notions of modernism and the avant-garde.
This handsomely illustrated volume focuses on Dalí’s work after 1940, presenting it as a multifaceted oeuvre that simultaneously drew inspiration from the Old Masters and the contemporary
world. Beginning in the late 1930s with the transition from Dalí’s well-known Surrealist canvases to the classicism he announced in 1941, the volume traces the artist’s work in illustration,
fashion, and theatre, predating commercial ventures by such celebrity artists as Andy Warhol. Essays evaluate the significance of Dalí’s nuclear mysticism” of the 1950s, his enduring
interest in science, optical effects, and illusionism, his collaborations with photographer Philippe Halsman (and his brief forays into Hollywood to work with Alfred Hitchcockand Walt
Disney), and visit the two major repositories of his workthe Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg.
