The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali
The Complete Films of Frank Capra
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Woman with Parasol by Claude Monet - 36.5×30.6″ 
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Flower As Image, The 
Yes, they’re beautiful, but this catalogue for the show The Flower as Image asks a thornier question at its core: Why has the flower motif fascinated all sorts of artists through the ages, from Van Gogh to Mapplethorpe? The answer is twofold. For one, it’s an easily accessible motif that simply provides a pretext for the artist to create a work. In addition, the flower brings with it a rich history as a symbol of sensuality, beauty, transience, love, sexuality, innocence, and Paradise. In fact, the flower is such a familiar symbol that an artist, in tackling the subject, is driven back to the very the question of what it means to create a work of art. Fifty artists are featured in this impressive collection, including Monet, Gauguin, Matisse, O’Keeffe, Picasso, Emil Nolde, Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol, Pipilotti Rist, and Nobuyoshi Araki.
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The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali
Ian Gibson’s fascinating portrait of Salvador Dali depicts an artist whose life is as fragmented as his paintings. Perhaps surprisingly, Gibson argues that an intense sense of shame was the driving force in the surrealist’s life and art, steering him between leaps of creative invention and personal ruin. With access to previously unknown biographical details, Gibson concludes that Dali’s shame centred around sexual conflict, particularly in his relationships with his muse Gala and his friend Garcia Lorca. In lieu of the sexual act, Dali cultivated a deeply exhibitionist persona and used his art as protection against the shame he associated with sex. As his fame grew so did his need to hide behind his extravagance; the sense of shame is directed outward rather than inward as a result. In the process, Dali betrayed his family, many of his artistic mentors, and in the end his own art.
Colour reproductions of Dali’s work illustrate the conflicts playing out in the artist’s history and mind, and while Gibson cannot fully explain the origins of Dali’s genius and where the artist’s true motivations originate, his argument is compelling and reveals a great deal about the tragic and brillant painter. –Aaron Abrams
Customer Review: The Persistence of Memory (ie you’ll remember this book!)
This is the most entertaining and erudite biography I think I have ever read. Gibson fully explores the muti-faceted life of the painter, but his main achievement is in the art of the biography as a genre, which he seems to have perfected. This long and detailed book is never dull, and makes you want to follow on to Gibson’s other biographical studies. Well structured and with a lively narrative, he shows us the inside and out of Dali’s personal, public and artistic lives. Nicely prodcued book too, although with someone like Dali you will always want more pictures than they could possibly fit in! Well worth the money.
