The Shameful Life of Salvador Dal

About this book

The most thorough and ambitious biography of Salvador Dal ever written a remarkable evocation of the outlandish personality paranoia and sexual torment lurking behind the nightmarish images that shook the world. Drawing on extensive original research and recently discovered sources Ian Gibson presents a daringly original portrait of one of this centurys most celebratedand infamousartists. He provides a full narrative of Dals life as artist and as uninhibited exhibitionist from his wild and troubled youth through his often rollickingly funny adventures in Paris New York and Hollywood to his poignant last years. Here is Dal fully revealed through his voluminous correspondence; his novel poems and essays; and interviews with some of those closest to him. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dal reexamines the roles of the two most important individuals in the artists life: the Spanish playwright and author Federico Garca Lorca and the enigmatic libidinous Gala the Russian migr whose marriage Dal broke up and with whom he subsequently lived in unconsummated bliss and terror. This is a truly incandescent life of the surrealist artist who caught the imagination of the twentieth century.