cover image Dali: The Salvador Dali Museum Collection

Dali: The Salvador Dali Museum Collection

Salvador Dali, Inc Salvador Dali Foundation, Anc Salvador Dali Foundation. Little Brown and Company, $50 (184pp) ISBN 978-0-8212-1810-5

This compact yet dazzling album, based on the collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., serves as an idea point of entry into the Dalian universe. Even in the early, representational, color-drenched paintings (1917-1927), one senses Dali's ``violent passion for the exterior world.'' Then comes the sudden plunge into the irrational (1927-1928), followed by a succession of surrealist canvases in which the Catalan prestidigitator purges his fantasies, fears and obsessions. Lubar, an art professor at New York University, argues that Dali (1904-1989), too often dismissed as a reactionary, ``sought nothing less than the liberation of desire through a critique of language and visuality.'' Judging by the evidence here, Dali's watercolors deserve to be as well known as his oils, and his sensitive, poised drawings give his febrile imagination free rein without the grandiloquence that mars some of the paintings. (May)