This fabulous book leads us through the fabulous world of dreams, hallucinations, phantasms, and fractured reality that Dali has created. Illustrations and words are combined in a masterly fashion to show the private world of a genius, a world that, in its myriad details, speaks to us all.

From Dali's birth in Figueras, Spain, we follow his extraordinary career in art, his exuberant public, and his prolific activities in many areas. In the late 1920s Dali was a leading Surrealist, probing the irrational and subconscious in his paintings.

The author, Robert Descharnes, a long-time friend of Dali, is the most authoritative writer on the artist. He relates the events of Dali's personal life and of the amazing couple Dali/Gala; he analyzes his major paintings and the sketches leading to them; he discusses Dali's writings, his work for the theater, movies, ballets, and book illustrating. A wonderful guide, Descharnes comments in detail about the volume's forty remarkable full-page colorplates.

In this book, a unique and scintillating world is presented to us, a world made possible only when reality, imagination, madness, and passion are mixed in Dalinian ways.