As a very young artist in training at the academy in Madrid, Salvador Dalí worked in two distinct modes—a highly detailed naturalism (under the influence of the “return to order”) and a more avant-garde, cubist-derived style that owed much to Picasso (whom Dalí visited in Paris in 1926). Then, in 1927, the twenty-three-year-old artist, influenced by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and the paintings of such artists as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, began to move towards Surrealism. In the spring of 1929, to coincide with the shooting of Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, Dalí organized his first Paris exhibition, thereby gaining acclaim as a full member of the surrealist movement.
This book offers a wealth of new material about Dalí’s formative years as a young artist in Spain and first years in Paris. Fèlix Fanés, one of the most knowledgeable Dalí scholars in the world, transforms perceptions of the artist and shows how the stage was set for the emergence of Dalí’s mature artistic personality. With a fresh and detailed assessment of Dalí’s truly revolutionary work, Fanés reveals the central role of the artist not only in the development of the Surrealist movement but also the course of 20th-century art.