THE DALÍ LEGACY

A bright, accessible biography that connects the dots between Salvador Dalí’s surrealist masterpieces and their visual references.

“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret,” Dalí once said, as if to tempt writers like Brown and Isbouts to attempt to crack his enigmatic body of work. Here, the authors aim to divine the “root of Dalí’s enduring popularity,” proposing that the artist’s appreciation of baroque and old master paintings has solidified his timelessness. Dalí developed a construct called the “paranoiac-critical method,” a term he used to describe his exploration of the “hidden visuals” of his subconscious. The authors address dormant erotic themes that haunt the artist’s paintings, but they also frame classical visual motifs as being similarly embedded in the artist’s mind. Just as a contorted, fleshy figure may signify the artist’s sexual hang-ups, two figures from an 1850s Jean-François Millet painting reappear throughout Dalí’s oeuvre like a recurring obsession. He understood that in order to excel as a surrealist, he would need to master the real. “While all of his contemporaries moved forward into the mists of an uncertain abstract future,” write the authors, “Dalí remained wedded to realism, to the palette and technique of the Old Masters as well as 19th-century academic artists.” Though his “allegiance to the realism of the Old Masters” is often obvious, the authors develop each connection with an informed depth that renders their subject as a deeply academic painter interested in more than just melting clocks, flying tigers, and burning giraffes. Two essays by Brown at the end of the biography offer wild new interpretations of Dalí paintings, as the author superimposes Dalí iconic motifs onto masterpieces by da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others. These claims are captivating but convoluted and feel incongruous with the rest of the book. Perhaps the authors work better as a pair.

A well-researched skeleton key with which to unlock some of Dalí’s many mysteries.