THE SECRET LIFE, Salvador Dali’s first volume of autobiography, was completed in 1941 and comprises one of modern art’s most revelatory – and revolutionary – literary documents. From Dalí’s birth, childhood and adolescence, during which we learn of the crucial events and influences which moulded his unique perspectives on life, art, sexuality and philosophy, THE SECRET LIFE goes on to record the artist’s inexorable ascendency to global renown – starting with the Surrealist movement in 1920s Paris, and culminating in his conquest of America in the 1930s. It was during this period that Dali perfected his revolutionary method of using photographic realism derived from the Dutch masters to present startling Freudian visions torn from the subconscious. THE SECRET LIFE Volume Two documents the years 1925 to 1940, and presents an illuminating memoir of the artist’s extraordinary rise to global prominence as not only the living embodiment of Surrealism, but as the most famous painter in modern art. This new edition of THE SECRET LIFE is updated and corrected, and also contains a complementary chronology of Dali’s life and works. Salvador Dali (May 1904 – January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work. He joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. No sooner had I arrived in Paris than I was in a great hurry to leave again. I wanted to begin as soon as possible the pictorial investigations of which I had conceived the idea in Cadaqués just at the time when my repudiation by my family occurred, paralyzing the course of my projects. I wanted to paint nothing less than an “invisible man”, but to do this I wanted to go away somewhere to the country again. But also I definitely wanted to take Gala along. The idea that in my own room where I was going to work there might be a woman, a real woman who moved, with senses, body hair and gums, suddenly struck me as so seductive that it was difficult for me to believe this could be realized. However, Gala was quite ready to go with me, and we were in the midst of deciding where we should go. Meanwhile – timidly and as if by chance – I tossed a certain number of bold slogans into the bosom of the surrealist group in order to test their demoralizing effect during my absence. I upheld “Raymond Roussel as against Rimbaud; the modern-style object as against the African object; still-life deception as against plastic art; imitation as against interpretation”. All this, I knew, would suffice for several years, and I purposely gave very few explanations. At this time I had not yet become a “talker”, and I uttered only the strictly necessary words, words intended solely to annoy everyone. The remnants of my pathological timidity edged my character with extremely uncommunicative features, features so abrupt that I was in effect conscious that people would look forward nervously to the infrequent occasions when I would open my mouth. Then, with a remark that was terribly crude and charged with Spanish fanaticism, I would express all that my pent-up eloquence had accumulated during painful and prolonged silences, when my polemic impatience would undergo the hundred-and-one martyrdoms of that French conversation, sprinkled with “esprit” and good sense that it often manages to conceal its lack of bony structure and of substance. On one occasion I had to listen to an art critic who was constantly talking about matter – the “matter” of Courbet, how he spread out his “matter”, how he felt at home in handling his “matter”. “Have you ever tried to eat it?” I finally asked. Becoming wittily French, I added, “When it comes to shit, I still prefer Chardin’s.”