For decades his bizarre canvases proclaimed him one of the most original of this century`s artists, while his personal antics certainly made him the most flamboyant.
Today, frail but sharp at 83, and as quirky as ever, Salvador Dali has chosen to spend his final years secluded in a surrealistic tower attached to his own Dali museum, an invisible visionary amidst his creative legacy.
A few hours spent in the ”theatre-museum” in Dali`s native Catalan town of Figueras is an experience odd enough to be worthy of this singular artist, known to millions as much by his mephistophelian moustache and ermine nightcaps as for such celebrated paintings as his 1931 ”The Persistence of Memory.” At the museum-just as in Dali`s 60-year career in painting, sculpture, film, design and philosophy-this oddness derives mainly from the artist`s jarring combination of whacky self-indulgence with apparently sincere attempts to deal with issues like death and the subconscious.
In a biting mountain wind at a courtyard before the hilltop museum, Japanese, Spanish and American tourists, among others, moved quickly early one recent morning from shops selling Dali-designed perfume and souvenirs to line up for tickets. Since its opening in 1974 in this town in the northeastern corner of Spain, this has become the second most visited museum in Spain, after the Prado in Madrid.
Dali`s art, long rejected in Russia, is now on view in an exhibition of his graphics at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and his surreal paintings remain familiar in the West. Despite all the enthusiasm for Dali`s art, however, nobody questioned by a reporter had any idea Dali himself was practically within earshot.
”A fair number of them ask me where Dali is buried! I tell them he`s very much alive, and lives next door,” said Maria Teresa Brugues, the artist`s personal secretary.
Like his surreal intimation of a human figure in ”The Invisible Man,”
one of his best known paintings in the museum, Dali is both here, and not here.
Since he moved into the museum annex two years after the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dali has closed himself off from all but a few intimate friends and a small staff.
”He practically doesn`t leave his bedroom,” said Brugues, who sees Dali daily to handle correspondence and to read the newspapers to the artist.
Only one, easy-to-miss hint lets a museum visitor know that Dali is indeed present. In an otherwise unremarkable hallway of Dali sketches and paintings, a visitor comes across a deeply set doorway decorated with a dozen of the same ceramic, three-cornered, golden bread rolls that speckle the tremendous, ochre walls of Dali`s tower on the street around the corner.
This is Dali`s passageway, the only connection between the two buildings, constructed specially so that Dali could move from tower to museum without going outside.
”The divine Dali,” as he often referred to himself in public, is the only one to use it, though extremely infrequently.
Instead, Dali presides over the life of the museum-the setting of a row of 10-foot-tall eggs on the roof, the installation of a wooden sailboat atop a column of tractor tires, and the like-through videotapes made for him and shown in his bedroom.
”He could go out if he wanted to,” Brugues said, but Dali emerges only two or three times a year to go to medical check-ups.
It is the last stage of withdrawal in Dali`s extraordinary career.
At the age of only 25, Dali put his imprint on one of the century`s most important avant-garde movements with his ”paranoic-critical method” of surrealism, which he laid out in 1928 in his first book, ”La Femme Invisible.”
But by the end of the 1930s, his originality and artistic commitment was being challenged by the movement`s same founders, such as Andre Breton, who had championed the young Catalan painter since he joined their circle in Paris in 1929.
Dali moved to California with his wife, Gala, who was to become the muse of his life`s work, and rejected the surrealists. He wrote scenarios and designed decor for ballets, created fashions with Chanel, published a romantic novel, and designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock`s film
”Spellbound.” The museum at Figueras began to take shape on Dali`s return to his native Catalonia in 1972. In the last few years it has become Dali`s monument to himself, his beloved Gala, and the most complete guide to the artist`s bewildering cosmology.
Washbasins, said to represent impure angels, and female maniquins, said to represent the purified, ring the upper walls of the former municipal theater. A giant mural of a decaying human head dominates the main hall. In the center of the mural`s figure, a darkened passageway reminiscent of the sphinx represents the gateway to death.
Mixed in with the cathedral-like format are humorously bizarre works showing Dali`s other side-a stuffed, standing alligator grasping a crystal lamp in one claw and a metal cube in the other, or an homage to Mae West composed of a couch in the form of voluptuous lips matched with a fireplace in the form of her nose.
Dali has chosen to live in the museum annex to be close to such works. But the artist who once migrated between suites at the St. Regis hotel in New York and the Meurice in Paris to his own Pubol castle in Catalonia, now has the world brought to him.
As the heavy, dark wooden door of his bedroom swung open on to a marble hallway on a recent afternoon, the sounds of a Tocelli serenade for violin came blasting out.
Dali was listening to some old favorites he used to hear played at Maxim`s in Paris. He had grown lonesome for the music and had ordered his staff to have it recorded in the famous restaurant, said Antoni Pitxot, a painter and close friend who visits at least a few times a week.
”With Dali, you have to do things quickly; it`s his temperament,”
Pitxot said. Likewise with Dali`s frequent and unpredictable interests in art. ”His mind doesn`t stop for a second-it`s his constant imagination. The last few days he`s been interested in the dome of the Vatican and
Michelangelo`s plans,” Pitxot said. The staff was able to get telefax copies for Dali from the National Library in Paris, he said.
Photographs of Dali taken this winter show the artist in bed, famed
”electric antennae” moustache a bit wispy, a tube down his throat to pump in nourishment.
Dali hasn`t had a meal in three years-because he decided one day to stop eating, explained Brugues, his secretary. Those who take care of him say Dali isn`t particularly ill, but quite stubborn and a bit of a hypochondriac.
”He`s got very good sight, hearing and memory,” Brugues said.
Dali spends much of his morning-he is awakened to tango music at about 11 2a.m.-going over correspondence with Brugues, until his siesta from 2 to 4:30 p.m. He usually stays awake, sitting in his otherwise spartan quarters, until about 8 p.m.
Occasionally, during those hours, he will accept a quick, official visit. Matched with the silence from the artist who most loved to talk is an apparent decision also to cease painting.
”He doesn`t seem inclined to paint anymore, but he is perfectly capable if he wants to. He`s not like Claude Monet who painted till the end,” Pitxot said. ”From talks with him, I think he may feel that his work is completed.”
