Dali’s Optical Illusions

by Edited by Dawn Ades; With contributions by Antonio Pinchot, Peter C. Sutton, and

• ISBN13: 9780300081770
• ISBN10: 0300081774
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2000-02-01
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

This visually gripping book focuses on a central but relatively unexamined aspect of the work of Salvador Dali: his fascination with optical effects and visual perception. The book examines Dali's use of various pictorial techniques, photography, and holograms to further his exploration of visual perception and the ways that optical illusion affects our sense of reality.

Dawn Ades and other authorities in the field discuss the paintings as The Enigma of William Tell, in which Dali experimented with anamorphosis, the perspectival distortion that produces on the canvas elongated forms demanding an oblique viewpoint. They also note his interest in other more conventional forms of perspective and their sources in both Dutch and Italian art. They study his development of the famous double image, the "paranoiac-critical method" that produced images that could be "read" in multiple ways, as seen in his Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach or Impressions of Africa. And they reveal his fascination with optical effects and three-dimensional illusions that is

Author Biography

Dawn Ades is professor of the history of art at the University of Essex.

Table of Contents

Director's Foreword	6	(1)
Lenders to the Exhibition	7	(1)
Acknowledgments	7	(2)
Sponsor's Foreword	9	(1)
Dali's Optical Illusions	10	(20)
Dawn Ades
``Artificial Magic''	30	(8)
Peter C. Sutton
``I am not a madman'': Salvador Dali in Hartford	38	(24)
Eric M. Zafran
Dali's Permanent Provocation	62	(4)
Antonio Pitxot
Montse Aguer
Catalogue	66