Fanés, Fèlix 1948-

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Fanés, Fèlix 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born 1948.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Placa Civica, UAB Campus, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain.

CAREER:

Salvador Dali Museum, Figueras, Spain, former director of archives; Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, professor of art history.

WRITINGS:

La vaga de tramvies del 1951: una crónica de Barcelona, Editorial Laia (Barcelona, Spain), 1977.

Cifesa, la antorcha de los éxitos, Institucion Alfonso el Magnánimo (Valencia, Spain), 1982.

La germana fosca, Destino (Barcelona, Spain), 1988.

El cas cifesa, vint anys de cine espanyol (1932-1951), Ediciones Filmoteca (Valencia, Spain), 1989.

(With others) Dalí escriptor, Fundació Caixa de Pensions (Barcelona, Spain), 1990.

(Author of text, with Daniel Giralt-Miracle) Dalí: felicitaciones de navidad = Christmas Cards = Weihnachtskarten: 1958-1976, Hoechst (Germany), 1992.

(Editor, with Montserrat Aguer) Salvador Dali, Dalí: El pan, Tusquets (Barcelona, Spain), 1993.

(Editor and author of introduction and notes) Salvador Dali, Un diari, 1919-1920: Les meves impressions i records íntims, Fundacion Gala-Salvador Dalí/ Edicions 62 (Barcelona, Spain), 1994.

(Editor) Salvador Dali, Dalí joven, 1918-1930: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, del 18 de Octubre de 1994 al 16 de Enero de 1995, Banco Bilbao (Vizcaya, Spain), 1995.

(Editor) L'alliberament dels dits: Obra catalana completa, Quaderns Crema (Barcelona, Spain), 1995.

Cinema, art i pensament, Ajuntament de Girona/Universitat de Girona (Girona, Spain), 1999.

Salvador Dalí: La construcción de la imagen 1925-1930, Electa (Spain), 1999, translated as Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image, 1925-1930, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007.

(Editor, with Joan M. Minguet) Homenatge a Joan Brossa: Doctor "honoris causa" per la UAB, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona Bellaterra (Barcelona, Spain), 2000.

La pintura y sus sombras: Cuatro estudios sobre salvador dalí, Museo de Teruel (Teruel, Spain), 2004.

La indiferència, Ediciones Destino (Barcelona, Spain), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Fèlix Fanés is an international authority on the life and works of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989). Fanés, a former director of the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueras, Spain, has edited several volumes of the artist's diaries and writings. His L'alliberament dels dits: Obra catalana completa offers Dali's complete writings in Catalan, and was welcomed as an important work for both specialists and general readers. Modern Language Review contributor David Vilaseca called the publication of this book "an occasion for celebration," explaining that a particular strength of the work is its illumination of Dali's connections early in his career with the literary and artistic avant-garde in Catalonia. During the period from 1919 to 1935, the artist wrote numerous articles on his aesthetic theories, as well as pieces on contemporary art, film, publicity, and other subjects. As L'alliberament dels dits makes clear, Dali's literary output from these years reveals what Vilaseca called a "startling coherence" of aesthetic and moral development. The book, in Vilaseca's view, is "a sheer delight to read, [and] … admirers of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali … will find [in it] all the originality, imaginative complexity, and cunning humour of Dali's later literary opus."

In Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image, 1925-1930, Fanés again focuses on Dali's early career. The book examines the period between Dali's first one-man show in Barcelona and his collaboration five years later with Luis Bunuel on the films Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. As a student, Dali had been steeped in the realist tradition and had developed impeccable skills as a painter. He had also been interested in cubism. Increasingly, he was drawn to the surrealists—including poet Paul Eluard and painter Joan Miro. Surrealism, which grew out of the theory that rationalism had created the conditions that led to the horrors of World War I and was therefore morally unsupportable, attempted to create artworks that rejected logic and communicated instead via odd juxtapositions and non sequiturs. Un Chien Andalou, for example, consists of bizarre images that do not make logical narrative sense—such as the film's iconic opening scene in which a woman's eye is slit with a razor (the filmmakers actually used a dead cow's eye for this shot).

In analyzing Dali's embrace of surrealism, Fanés considers the artist's response to several influences, including Vermeer, Picasso, Miro, de Chirico, and Eluard, as well as his friendship with poet Federico Garcia Lorca. A Publishers Weekly critic hailed Salvador Dalí as a "meticulously researched and lucidly written study of the intellectual, artistic and historical circumstances that shaped the artist's early career," concluding that the book will not only prove a valuable resource to art historians but will impress general audiences with its importance and readability.