Salvador Dalí at Home explores the influence of Catalan culture and tradition, Dalí's home life and the places he lived, on his life and work. Fully illustrated with over 130 illustrations of his famous work, as well as lesser known pieces, archive imagery, contemporary landscapes and personal photographs, the book provides uniquely accessible insight into the people and places that shaped this iconic artist and how the homes and landscapes of his life relate to his work.

In the popular imagination, possibly no other artist’s work is more recognizable than that of Salvador Dalí. Indeed, for many he is the ultimate mad artist, whose singular vision remorselessly probed his own psychological depths. His nightmarish visions and bizarre landscapes express the angst and turbulence of the twentieth century. Dalí’s creativity embraced many different modes of expression and was never constrained by any one style. Over eight decades, the prodigious range of Dalí’s activity spanned every conceivable medium, from painting and drawing to sculpture, film, furniture, books, stage design and jewelry, not to mention his highly eccentric public persona, which could be considered an art form in itself.

Dalí conceived his Theatre-Museum as a building full of surprises and special effects. This guide shows us the secrets of the artist’s last grand creation, providing us with the clues and keys to gain access to his personal world, imaginative and full of touches of humour.

This extensive volume uncovers Dali’s influences, artistic development, and legacy, offering unprecedented access inside the world of the man behind the mustache. Through astute analysis of Dali’s work and how the events of his time converged with his drive to become a legend, this volume examines one of the most significant contributors to twentieth-century art. Although recognized primarily as a painter, Dali experimented with a wide range of media. This comprehensive review includes the literature, photography, film, and sculpture that influenced and was created by Dali throughout his career, from paintings such as The Persistence of Memory, to the icons of the surrealist movement such as the Mae West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone, to short film collaborations with Luis Buñuel. The author offers insight into this undisputed genius, charting Dali’s progression as an artist and controversial public figure, and demonstrating his influence on contemporary artists such as Warhol, Koons, and Murakami.

The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, houses the most comprehensive collection in the world of the art of Salvador Dali (1904-1989), the renowned Surrealist painter. From the Museum's extensive holdings, forty masterpieces have been selected for this volume by the art historian Kenneth Wach. All forty are reproduced in color, as full-page plates. For each, Mr. Wach has written an illuminating commentary, discussing both the works' style, in art-historical terms, and their often complex psychological content. In addition, the book's general introduction provides a broad overview of Dali's flamboyant career as an artist. It traces the course of Dali's development from his first childhood efforts in Catalonia to his participation in the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, to his sojourn in the United States during World War II and his late works executed in Spain. Among the famous images included here are luminous still lifes from Dali's youth, which show his debts to the Old Masters. There are also a number of his remarkable Surrealist beach scenes, with their mysterious vistas and obsessive sexuality. Several troubled depictions of the distorted human body, dating from the difficult period of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, culminate in the expectant Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man. The volume features as well some prime examples of Dali's later "nuclear mysticism," where traditional religious iconography is joined with motifs taken from modern physics. Notable among the later works is The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, a radical reinterpretation of his celebrated earlier painting with limp watches, now reconceived in terms of Albert Einstein's theories of space and time. In scale, the works reproduced as colorplates range from Dali's epic, mural-size canvas The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus to a small, subtly rendered for his Christ of St. John of the Cross. Also illustrated, in black and white, is a representative selection of Dali's drawings, demonstrating his consistently fine draftsmanship through all the phases of his career. A brief preface on the history of the Salvador Dali Museum, a detailed chronology of the artist's life, a bibliography, and an index complete the volume.

Life Magazine wrote that one funhouse at the 1939 World's Fair stood out among the others: "Dal's Dream of Venus, the creation of famed Surrealist painter Salvador Dal, is the most recent addition to the still-growing list of amusement-area girl shows and easily the most amazing. Weird building contains a dry tank and a wet tank. In the wet tank girls swim under water, milk a bandaged-up cow, tap typewriter keys which float like seaweed. Keyboard of piano is painted on the recumbent female figure made of rubber. In dry tank...a sleeping Venus reclines in 36-foot bed, covered with white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Scattered about the bed are lobsters frying on beds of hot coals and bottles of champagne....All this is most amusing and interesting." The building's modern, expressionistic exterior, with an entrance framed by a woman's legs, and shocking interior, including the bare-breasted "living liquid ladies" who occupied the tanks, caused quite a stir. The funhouse was so successful that it reopened for a second season, but once torn down it faded from memory and its outlandishness became the stuff of urban myth. Now, more than 60 years later, a collection of photographs of the Dream of Venus by Eric Schaal has been discovered. In stunning black-and-white and early Kodachrome, they show both the construction and the completion of the funhouse-from Dal painting a melting clock to showgirls parading for their audience. Salvador Dal's Dream of Venus reveals not only an eccentric work of architecture, but also a one-of-a-kind creation by one of the most fertile imaginations of the 20th century.