Dali's Optical Illusions - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300081774 ISBN 13: 9780300081770

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Explores Dali's experiments with perspectives, offering more than one hundred color and sixty-one black and white illustrations of the artist's optical illusions.

About this title

About the Author:

Dawn Ades is professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex. She is also the author of many books on Spanish art and Surrealism, and the author of Art in Latin America (ISBN 0 300 04561 1), published by Yale University Press.

From Booklist:

"If you compare me with any classical painter whatsoever, then I'm an absolute nonentity," confessed Salvador Daliin his late years. The statement is particularly ironic given Dali's status as one of the most original twentieth-century artists and the twentieth-century artists' general disregard for the masters. But Dali, of course, was never one to run with the crowd. In fact, Dalibuilt his extraordinary technical repertoire by studying the ancient masters of perspective and applying what he had learned to create canvases of his own mad visions. As the writers explain in this collection, Dali's experiments with perspectives were all-encompassing. The catalog examines his study of conventional forms of perspective in Dutch and Italian art, as well as his play with anamorphosisthe perspectival distortion that produces on the canvas elongated forms demanding an oblique viewpoint--such as in The Enigma of William Tell. It also examines Dali's own invention of the "paranoiac-critical method," which produced the famous double image that can be "read" in multiple ways, such as in Apparition of the Face. The exhibition catalog contains 109 color and 61 black-and-white illustrations of Dali's fantastic optical illusions. Veronica Scrol

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0300081774
• ISBN 13: 9780300081770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196
• Editor: Ades Dawn