Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Dalí

Rate this book
Peintre, sculpteur, écrivain, réalisateur et homme de spectacle, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) fut un des plus grands exhibitionnistes et excentriques du vingtième siècle. Il fut aussi un des premiers artistes à appliquer les théories de la psychanalyse freudienne à l'art, et devint célèbre avec ses œuvres surréalistes, comme les montres molles ou le téléphone homard, qui sont aujourd'hui des jalons de l'entreprise surréaliste et du modernisme en général.

Dalí décrivait fréquemment ses peintures comme "des photographies de rêves peints à la main". La tension captivante qui en émane réside dans la représentation précise d'éléments bizarres et dans ses compositions incongrues. Comme l'expliquait lui-même Dalí, il peignait avec "la plus impérialiste rage de précision", mais seulement "pour systématiser la confusion et ainsi participer à discréditer totalement le monde de la réalité."

Révolutionnant le rôle de l'artiste, le moustachu Dalí eut aussi l'intuition d'exhiber un personnage controversé dans l'arène publique et de créer à travers la gravure, la mode, la publicité, l'écriture et le cinéma une œuvre qui pouvait être consommée et pas seulement contemplée au mur d'un musée.

Ce livre explore à la fois la peinture et la personnalité de Dalí, en présentant ses aptitudes techniques, ses compositions provocatrices et ses thèmes fétiches, souvent ardus – la mort, le pourrissement et l'érotisme.

95 pages, Hardcover

Published July 29, 2015

8 people are currently reading
58 people want to read

About the author

Gilles Néret

127 books49 followers
Gilles Néret (1933 - August 3, 2005) was a French art critic and historian, journalist and curator. He wrote extensively on the history of erotica.

He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He directed art reviews such as L’Oeil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications. Since 1992, Néret was an editor for Taschen, for which he has written catalogues raisonnés of the works of Klimt and others, as well as the author of Erotica Universalis.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
16 (26%)
4 stars
28 (46%)
3 stars
11 (18%)
2 stars
4 (6%)
1 star
1 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Profile Image for Romi.
52 reviews4 followers
October 24, 2024
Una síntesis muy buena como primera aproximación a la vida y la trayectoria artística de Salvador Dalí.

Los textos son claros, por lo que su lectura se hace rápida y sencilla. Destaca el recorrido por la obra del artista con imágenes de muy buena calidad.

Como debilidades, no profundiza en el análisis de algunas obras centrales del artista, tampoco en ciertos conceptos relevantes y aspectos formales de la misma.
Profile Image for Bruno Laschet.
693 reviews21 followers
December 5, 2024
Sehr guter überblick über das Leben und Schaffen von Dali. Sehr gute Auswahl der vorgestellten Bücher und auch die Qualität der Drucke war gut für mich. Hier stimmte das Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis!
Profile Image for Ahn Hundt.
165 reviews2 followers
April 21, 2023
Dalí's provocative surrealism always intrigued me, and this beautiful edition of Taschen was the perfect way to get a little deeper into his art and curious life. Of course, he is a controversial figure, a very questionable man and a painter that went through phases that vary in quality and substance, but if he was one thing, it's that he was a genius. I could talk for hours about the brilliant works that he painted, but I feel like it is unnecessary to do so in a review of a book, so let me talk a little bit about this edition and the text of Gilles Néret.

Néret offers a very informative and objective perspective on the artist, in fact, at parts it felt more like reading a Wikipedia article rather than one person's own biography of Dalí, but I mean, I shouldn't expect much more, and many people probably prefer a literary text like this rather than a more sincere and personal collection of data about him. I found the pace a bit excruciating, it took me a long while to read it just because I never really had anything to sort of hold on to that would intrigue me to read more, and whenever I picked it up, it was always reading either one page at a time or quickly reading more than a dozen pages. Aside from me getting lost in the hypnotizing worlds that Dalí put to his canvases, I often drifted off because I couldn't get invested in much, even though his life and a lot of his actions and quotes are so weird and enticing that you'd think to get a different reaction from it. Nevertheless, there's nothing particularly wrong with his writing, it's just not engaging to me, but still obviously educational (despite me wanting to know more). I feel like there were parts that dragged on and focused on things that weren't important, but as I said before, I didn't really expect anything else. This edition's layout is really great, it's pretty much exactly how you'd want it to be with a lot of beautiful prints in it.

Dalí's paintings are so evocative and deeply psychological as well as obscure, and the text is kinda bland, surface level and doesn't really beat around the bush when it comes to writing something, it's cold and simple.
Profile Image for Nik.
99 reviews
August 9, 2021
A great journey through the life and art of Dali. Perfect for casual observers to learn more. It appears to me that I like the guy less now I have learnt more about him. He basically comes across as the shock-artist of his day, out to offend people and to use ridiculous metaphorical surrealism which seems dreamed up purely to grab attention and outdo his peers. Just as he starts to settle and produce some great work, he kicks the bucket.

As with other books in the Taschen series, this could be greatly improved if the art under discussion could be placed in closer proximity to the text rather than half a dozen pages away. It's a pain in the arse having to flick back and forth every other paragraph to view the item under discussion.
76 reviews
January 27, 2023
I liked the way Dali was described and you got to look at the pictures with some small descriptions. The only thing I didn't like was that the texts were apart in different pages with a lot of pictures within them and you the start midsentence on the next page where you could have to reread what was said before 
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.