FROM THE BOOK

"Eccentric, madman, genius? To an extent greater than almost any other artist of the 20th century, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) dissolved the borders between art and life, originality and commerce. His visions of Surrealism and the aesthetic fusion of dream and reality, which expresses itself as hallucination, fever and frenzy or delirium, were manifested in almost all artistic media and also in his self-dramatization. Dalí is not only one of the most famous painters of his generation, who implemented the principles of his so-called paranoïac-critical method in the style of the Old Masters and is recognized for his motifs all over the world; Dalí was also one of the first artists to concern himself with design, cinema and mass media, and followed marketing strategies that are now mainly associated with the name Andy Warhol. The techniques of the Surrealists centering around André Breton, which tried to evoke the images of the unconscious through a passive condition of the ego using écriture automatique, were confronted by Dalí with a demonstrative individualism, as he reacted polemically to the political accusations and the exclusion of his person from the group by saying: 'I am not a Surrealist. I am Surrealism. Surrealism is not a party or a label; it is a state of mind, unique, to each his own, that can be affected by no party line, taboo, or morality. It is the total freedom to be and the right to absolute dreaming.' For this multimedia artist, who was active in almost every area of art production, designing stage sets, perfume bottles and jewelry, working with Hitchcock and Walt Disney, filming advertising spots, appearing on TV shows and making his paintings available as cover art for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Country House, Surrealism was a way of life. Dalí took over a huge range of roles and cultivated his appearance, which became a brand and, ultimately, a caricature."
—Gerald A. Matt, Excerpted from the Foreword to Le Surrealisme c'est moi!.