Dali explores the rich complexity of his imagination and sets him in context as both a scion of the Surrealist movement and a fiercely independent spirit. A comprehensive introduction focuses on Dalis development and uses of the paranoiac-critical method in the early 1930s as a means of liberating the creative unconsciousness. The author argues that the paintings of this period, with their hallucinatory force, represent the most original and exciting period in Dali's long working life, and relates them to both his earlier Surrealist work and his post-war painting. 60 of his most representative works are reproduced in large-format full color, and detailed commentaries elucidate their complex and disturbing imagery, the expression of Dali's personal obsessions. Dali is a fitting memorial to a unique artistic phenomenon.

Every time someone dies, it is Jules Vernes fault, claimed Salvador Dali. Whoever was responsible for his death in 1989, it brought to an end one of the twentieth centurys most extraordinary lives. For more than sixty years Dali, with his trademark moustache, epitomized the eccentric artist; he once tried to give a lecture dressed in a diving suit and arrived at the Sorbonne in a Rolls Royce filled with cauliflowers.But cultivating publicity with outrageous behaviour did to some extent compromise Dali"s artistic reputation. Although his name is widely known, it is more as a personality than an artist. This concentration on Dali the showman has tended to underplay his exceptional skill as a draftsman. He could render the wildest excesses of his fertile imagination in a technique learned from the old masters. Images as diverse as the famous melting watches of The Persistence of Memory, the Christ of St John of the Cross,and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus are depicted in a manner both striking and subtle,moving and disturbing.

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael

Cubist Self-Portrait

Seated Girl Seen from the Back

Figure on the Rocks

Apparatus and Hand

Bather

The First Days of Spring

The Lugubrious Game

Illumined Pleasures

Accommodations of Desire

The Great Masturbator

The Enigma of Desire: My Mother,

My Mother, My Mother

The Hand, Remorse

The Persistence of Memory

William Tell

Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion

The Enigma of William Tell

Anthropomorphic Bread

Meditation on the Harp

The Phantom Cart

Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately

Preceding the Arrival of the Conic

Anamorphoses

The Architectural Angelus of Millet

The Atavism of Dusk

Archaeological Reminiscence of Millets Angelus

Average AtmosPherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp

Atavistic Vestiges After the Rain

The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition

Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table

Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano Portrait of Gala

Paranoiac- Critical Solitude

The Great Paranoiac

Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans:Premonition of Civil War

Autumn Cannibalism

Swans Reflecting Elephants

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

Impressions of Africa

Spain

Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach

The Endless Enigma

Beach Scene with Telephone

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire

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