Dalí's Unfulfilled Desires: From Purism to Surrealism

Jean-Louis Gaillemin's book 'Salvador Dalí. Désirs inassouvis, du purisme au surréalisme' focuses on the period 1925-1935, offering a detailed analysis of Dalí's evolution from Le Corbusier's purism to the rehabilitation of Modern Style. Derived from a doctoral thesis, the text is dense with references and descriptions but is considered one of the best French-language studies on the surrealist showman, who is emerging from purgatory. Gaillemin starts with Dalí's 1934 portrait of Emilio Terry, an architect and minor surrealist figure, and returns to it at the end to reveal how Dalí depicted Terry's sexual inhibitions. The book examines Dalí's relationship with Federico García Lorca, André Breton's hopes for Dalí as a new Rimbaud, and his intellectual kinship with Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Carl Einstein. The clearest pages explain the invention of paranoid-critical method and its distinction from surrealist automatism.