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Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small. Roger Roth- man. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 262. $60.00 (cloth).
"Humility and patience" (50), "self-restraint" (145), "self-control and self-denial" (12), and a concern for that which is "modest, humble, ordinary and inconsequential" (10)-words such as these do not spontaneously arise in conjunction with the name Salvador Dalí or his oeuvre. Yet in a study that is as finely detailed as the very "aesthetic of the small" that it examines, Roger Rothman builds a convincing case for Dalí's identification with, and dedication to, those entities and experiences that lie on the peripheries of the sensate or the borders of the acknowledge- able. Rothman develops a nuanced perspective on this paradoxical marriage between the artist's outsized persona and his enthusiasm for the diminutive and forgettable, and thus highlights the critical, and arguably burlesque, nature of Dalí's attraction to the grotesquely insignificant. Roth- man appropriately writes: "One irony of Dalí's lifelong fascination with the small is that the man was an egotist of enormous proportion" (21). Tiny Surrealism successfully dilutes the generic caricature of a camera-ready Dalí, haunting coffee-table books, wall calendars, and classroom discussions, while at the same time the study maintains an awareness of the centrality of satirical humor to Dalí's production.
Written in a lucid and readable style appropriate even for the novice student of surrealism, Tiny Surrealism excavates a different side to Dalí: that of the empathetic, stunningly perspica- cious, and vulnerable man, who is always favoring the underdog. Ever an aficionado of extremes, Dalí obsessively and awkwardly fixated on boogers, bread crumbs, blackheads,...