Author Description

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the most famous and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Although he was prolific for more than sixty years--creating 1,200 oil paintings and countless drawings, sculptures, theatre and fashion designs, book illustrations, and writings--the nearly universal current critical judgment is that his work reached its zenith in the early 1930s, when he was affiliated with the Surrealist movement. The forty years of work executed after 1940--the bulk of his oeuvre--is often seen as repetitious, reactionary, and overly commercialized. Such criticisms mainly arose from his 1941 reinvention of himself as a "classicist," his embrace of Catholicism, and his support for General Franco--postures that distanced him from notions of modernism and the avant-garde.