Customer Reviews

Dalis Begierden (Pegasus Library)

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The 90 or so color reproductions of Dali's paintings are of very good quality, though suffering some from the paper used for the book - it is not top quality. But it is unfortunate that they are often too small to do justice to the paintings - Dali's paintings often contain many small images or clusters of images, and they are difficult to discern at the size printed without the use of a magnifying glass. It would have been better to publish this book in a size larger than the 6 1/2" X 9 1/2" that it is.

Ralf Schiebler's text is disastrous. He starts with the fairly enough stated thesis that "From earliest childhood . . . it was clear that [Dali] needed to be the centre of attention." He drops that thesis soon enough, never to pick up on it again, and lapses into psychobabble, attempting to analyze Dali's psyche from the 'data' in his paintings. He doesn't stop with Dali, but proceeds to Dali's father, claiming that Dali's father "often emerges in the figure of William Tell." And that "It could be that Dali's father reacted so strongly [to the exhibition of the painting 'The Enigma of Desire'] because, subconsciously, he sensed in the work a possible reference to his own behaviour towards his late wife". It is all quite unconvincing. And let's not forget Dali's mother: "What had been a child's erotic ideal, became reality in [Dali's wife] Gala. 'The Enigma of Desire' marked the point when his love for his mother had to give way to his love for a woman. Dali emphasized this change - although, or perhaps because, he knew that young men are unmistakably influenced in their choice of a woman by the example of their own mothers." Not necessarily so, Mr. Schiebler.

Finally, in the last section called "Curiosity" Schiebler returns from Freudian psychoanalysis to art criticism/explication. I find much of it to be unpersuasive - he explicates paintings in a manner I cannot agree with. But maybe that's just me.

3 stars for the reproductions, as they're available more suitably in other books, but 1 for the text - it averages to 2 stars overall.