The first difficulty in reviewing this book is that its subjects, Salvador and Gala Dalí, really were quite unappealing people: self-centered to the point of extreme pathology, greedy, and remarkably philistine. Ian Gibson has revealed their repulsive habits and extravagant excesses in submicroscopic detail. Much that we find objectionable about today’s art scenes in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere had its outstanding original incarnation in Dalí—above all, unrestrained self-advertisement as a substitute for creative application, such as has made Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Jeff Koons, among many others, infamous.
Salvador and Gala Dalí really were quite unappealing people: self-centered to the point of extreme pathology, greedy, and remarkably philistine.
Yet Dalí and the academic Surrealist style he exemplifies remain, for all his many bad qualities, a significant component of twentieth-century art history—important enough that a serious examination of his place would be extremely useful. Gibson’s bloated concoction has gained an astonishing degree of critical acclaim from reviewers and been accompanied by a similar video on television. Nevertheless, it is anything but the authoritative biography its author and publisher obviously hoped it would be.
To begin with, although it has been hyped as a definitive monograph comparable to John Richardson’s biography of Picasso, this tome is not really a biography. It is a swollen polemic against its subject, concerned first and foremost with the scandalous—i.e., the “shameful”—aspects of Dalí’s career, which the author has made his sole theme. Yet there is nothing original about such
