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.
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!
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.
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.
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