by Ian Gibson
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by Salvador Dali
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Ian Gibson's fascinating portrait of Salvador Dali depicts an artist whose life is as fragmented as his paintings. Perhaps surprisingly, Gibson argues that an intense sense of shame was the driving force in the surrealist's life and art, steering him between leaps of creative invention and personal ruin. With access to previously unknown biographical details, Gibson concludes that Dali's shame centred around sexual conflict, particularly in his relationships with his muse Gala and his friend Garcia Lorca. In lieu of the sexual act, Dali cultivated a deeply exhibitionist persona and used his art as protection against the shame he associated with sex. As his fame grew so did his need to hide behind his extravagance; the sense of shame is directed outward rather than inward as a result. In the process, Dali betrayed his family, many of his artistic mentors, and in the end his own art.
Colour reproductions of Dali's work illustrate the conflicts playing out in the artist's history and mind, and while Gibson cannot fully explain the origins of Dali's genius and where the artist's true motivations originate, his argument is compelling and reveals a great deal about the tragic and brillant painter. --Aaron Abrams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
In January 1986 Dali summoned Gibson to a meeting at which he exhorted author to make it clear in the forthcoming second volume of his biography of Gabriel Garcia Lorca that the poet had loved Dali sexually. The stories Dali told him provided the catalyst for this book. The task of telling Dali's life is not easy; the artist was a skilled dissembler who cultivated his myth and wrote an autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali as, Gibson suggests, a means of forestalling "meddlers." Gibson himself is a talented biographer with a detective's soul. He plunges into Dali's correspondence and diaries, exposes their half-truths and falsehoods, and dares to suggest that Dali was driven by a profound sense of shame. In the artist's early years, shame reduced him to furiously blushing agony and made even the most cursory social interactions difficult. Playing out this psychoanalytic theme, Gibson explores the repercussions throughout his life and his art. Sexual anxiety not only shaped the artists's relationships - including those with Lorca and Gala, the artist's wife - but also provided a lexicon of imagery in Dali's wildly inventive Surrealist paintings. Gibson never lets his psychoanalytic interpretation overpower his narrative, however, and skillfully manages to maintain control of the story even as the characters in Dali's life multiply, divide, and become increasingly successful and strange. Wisely, he compresses the latter part of Dali's life, and expends most of his authorial energy on the first third, a period of time in which Dali completed his most original, visually dissonant work and collaborated with both Lorca and Luis Bunuel, In spite of his social agonies, Dali's shame - if indeed that's what it was - powered some of the most outrageous and compelling paintings of the early 20th century. Mastering vast quantities of information, Gibson succeeds in evoking not only Dali's life, but also the intellectual and aesthetic milieu of a close-knit group of artists and writers whose work shocked the world. (Kirkus Reviews)
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33% buy Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life£12.99 |
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