The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali (Adventures in Art) [Hardcover]

Angela Wenzel (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 and up | Series: Adventures in Art

This book presents the strange, humorous and wildly inventive paintings of Salvador Dali. The author helps children unlock the mysteries of Dali's artwork by explaining his use of detail, colour and illusion. Each double page spread in this book explores a single work to illustrate the ideas and influences that shaped Dali's work. The author introduces themes such as dream imagery, landscape painting, portraiture and satire. Throughout the book, the artist's sense of playfulness and mystery shine through, revealing to children the wondrous qualities of art.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 8 and up
  
• Hardcover: 30 pages
• Publisher: Prestel Publishing (September 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3791329448
• ISBN-13: 978-3791329444
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #782,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Introducing young students to the creative insanity of Dali, May 24, 2004

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali (Adventures in Art) (Hardcover)

It is hard to do justice to the imaginative insanity of Salvador Dali, but Angela Wenzel does a pretty good job for this volume in the Adventures in Art series. "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali" introduces young readers to the Surrealist artist who knew how to put himself in the limelight in ways other than his paintings. One of things that Wenzel does is that she provides some of Dali's own comments about his art, such as the 1937 painting "Sleep," where a heavy face that looks like the film director Luis Bunuel is propped by my crutches and explaining the link between the writings of Sigmund Freud on dreams and Dali's painting "The Burning Giraffe" (1936-37), where drawers are coming out of a tall woman's body. Also included are the famous melting clocks of "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), the fried eggs of "The Sublime Moment" (1938), and the multiple pictures within "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus" (1937).

What I especially like about this volume is how it looks at the origins of some of these paintings. For "The Endless Enigma" (1938) we have the original sketches of the six different paintings that Dali hid in the finished painting, while a postcrd showing an African village became a face turned on its side in "Paranoid Faces" (1931). Then there was the "Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas" (1945), which Dali based on Piero della Francesca's "Battista Sforza and Federico de Montefeltro" (circa 1465) by way of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's "Winter," a marvelous example of how the old becomes new in the hands of a talented artist.

Young readers will also be exposed to some prime examples of Dali's imagination with regards to other types of art beyond paintings, such as his infamous "Lobster Telephone" (1936) and the "Mae West Lips Sofa" (1937), although I miss seeing the harp covered with silverware that he made for his friend Harpo Marx. There are also some choice photographs of "Dali the superstar" engaging in the art of self-promotion. Just showing young readers examples of Dali's artwork is enough to get them interested in the artist, but Wenzel takes pain to explain how Dali created his masterpieces and what he was trying to do with some of these pieces. This is one of the more truly educational books I have seem about a great artist written for young readers.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It wasn't what I expected., October 3, 2010

By 

Karrin G. Erecius - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali (Adventures in Art) (Hardcover)

This coloring book wasn't what I expected or wanted. I thought it was going to be a coloring book where one would color the paintings in. It wasn't. I'm definitely not satisfied with it.