The Secret Life Volume One: Salvador Dali' s Autobiography: 1904-1924 - Softcover

Dali, Salvador

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840686855 ISBN 13: 9781840686852

Publisher: Deicide Press, 2023

Synopsis

THE SECRET LIFE, Salvador Dali’s first volume of autobiography, was completed in 1941 and comprises one of modern art’s most revelatory – and revolutionary – literary documents. From Dalí’s birth, childhood and adolescence, during which we learn of the crucial events and influences which molded his unique perspectives on life, art, sexuality and philosophy, THE SECRET LIFE goes on to record the artist’s inexorable ascendancy to global renown – starting with the Surrealist movement in 1920s Paris, and culminating in his conquest of America in the 1930s.
THE SECRET LIFE Volume One documents the years 1904 to 1924, and presents an illuminating memoir of the artist’s extraordinary childhood to his preliminary excursions as a young seditionary set to detonate the Parisan art scene.
This new edition of THE SECRET LIFE is updated and corrected, and also contains a complementary chronology of Dali’s life and works.

About this title

About the Author

Salvador Dali (May 1904 – January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work. He joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fortunately I am not one of those beings who when they smile are apt to expose remnants, however small, of horrible and degrading spinach clinging to their teeth. This is not because I brush my teeth better than others; it is due to the much more categorical fact that I do not eat spinach. It so happens that I attach to spinach, as to everything more or less directly pertaining to food, essential values of a moral and aesthetic order. And of course the sentinel of disgust is ever on hand, vigilant and full of severe solicitude, ceremoniously attentive to the exacting choice of my foods.
I like to eat only things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp. I detest spinach because of its utterly amorphous character, so much so that I am firmly convinced, and do not hesitate for a moment to maintain, that the only good, noble and edible thing to be found in that sordid nourishment is the sand.
The very opposite of spinach is armour. That is why I like to eat armour so much, and especially the small varieties, namely, all shell-fish. By virtue of their armour, which is what their exoskeleton actually is, these are a material realization of the highly original and intelligent idea of wearing one’s bones outside rather than inside, as is the usual practice.
The crustacean is thus able, with the weapons of its anatomy, to protect the soft and nutritive delirium of its insides, sheltered against all profanation, enclosed as in a tight and solemn vessel which leaves it vulnerable only to the highest form of imperial conquest in the noble war of decortication: that of the palate. How wonderful to crunch a bird’s tiny skull!1 How can one eat brains any other way! Small birds are very much like small shell-fish. They wear their armour, so to speak, flush with their skin. In any case Paolo Uccello painted armour that looked like little ortolans and he did this with a grace and mystery worthy of the true bird that he was and for which he was named...

Edition details

• Publisher: Deicide Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840686855
• ISBN 13: 9781840686852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168