Surprising only to visitors, Salvador Dali’s museum in his hometown stretches brazenly along a city block, its red walls pocked with round ceramic loaves of bread, its roofline studded with alternating eggs and mannequins.
The locals are used to it-proud of it, in fact. Mention Figueres in Europe, and you get the reaction, “That’s where the Dali Museum is.”
It is a few thousand miles in distance, and a great chasm away in concept, from its staid American cousin, the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Dali’s own museum in Figueres, the one he built for himself and lived in during his last years, is more properly called the Teatro-Museo Dali, if anything about this showplace can be called proper.
The building formerly was the town’s municipal theater, built in the 19th Century and nearly destroyed in a fire during the Spanish Civil War. It lay in ruins until Dali resurrected it for his museum in 1974.
He could have selected no more appropriate place. Dali, Surrealism’s best-known artist, had a flamboyant style and a theatrical flair. And as a child Dali held his first exhibit in the smoking room of the theater.
The museum is the centerpiece of Figueres, a once-fortified, now industrial city of 33,000. Aged buildings encroach on narrow streets laid out before auto traffic. Downtown is the center of trade and commerce, bustling with businessmen and businesswomen and homemakers.
Shiny outlying suburban malls do not exist. The museum is just two blocks uphill from the Rambla, the plaza that is the heart of downtown.
Figueres is Dali. A sign announces the city: “Figueras,” the Catalan spelling, accompanied by a drawing of the geodesic dome that tops the museum, designed by Emilio Perez Pinero. Gift shops offering Dali reproductions, holograms, T-shirts, tote bags and other memorabilia dot streets near the museum.
An hour east is the Costa Brava fishing village of Cadaques, where Dali lived most of his life and where he drew inspiration for those strange, smooth brown mountains and beaches that provide the settings for his dreamscapes, double illusions and droopy clocks.
This is Catalonia, a region with its own language independent of the Castilian Spanish spoken elsewhere in the country. Barcelona, its capital, is a 90-minute freeway drive to the south; France is a short distance north.
Dali intended the museum to be a piece of art in itself, “a gigantic Surrealist object,” he once said. Within its walls are “much of my work and all of my genius.”
And, though incomplete, the museum is a self-portrait.
It is showy, flashy and absurd. It reflects an artist known for egotism, self-aggrandizement and bombastic personality.
Some critics argue that for his attention-getting schemes, not his artistic ability, Dali is one of the best known artists of this century.
Yet he is included in the major contemporary museums of the world and is treasured with Picasso and Miro as one of Spain’s great 20th Century artists. His best known painting, “The Persistence of Memory,” hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Surrealism, founded in Paris in 1924, uses Freudian psychology as a basis. It sought to express a dream world, a world of the subconscious, in which reality became a superreality or, in French, Surrealite. Eventually, the Surrealists rejected Dali because he was too flamboyant.
Much of Dali’s art is technical bravado and gimmickry. Dali was a master draftsman. His paintings have a slick perfection.
Often his art startles the viewer and stirs unsettling emotions. He also revealed the things that moved him most, painting countless depictions of insects (which he feared) and of his wife, Gala (whom he adored).
But Dali was also a private, enigmatic man, suffering from paranoia, phobias and depression.
The Teatro-Museo Dali reveals the more upbeat side of the artist’s personality. Its surreal conglomeration presents the external, public facets of the artist himself.
It also presents the enigma. The Figueres museum has no labels on works, no catalog of the collection, and until 1990, not even a printed floor plan of the rambling, multilevel building.
Says Lluis Penuelas, secretary general of the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, the foundation that runs the museum, “He wanted the people to interpret by themselves what they were seeing.”
The Figueres museum charges 500 pesetas admission ($4.30 U.S., based on 116 pesetas to the dollar). In 1991, it drew 551,000 visitors.
Figueres museum officials estimate that 40 percent of visitors come from Spain, based on purchases of a small guide published in 1990 in six languages. Nineteen percent buy the English version.
Once through the doors, visitors are left to wander and wonder on their own. Among their encounters:
– A Cadillac assemblage. It is a real car, Cadillac’s first model, with a statue, “Queen Esther,” by Ernst Fuchs perched on the hood. Behind it is a tower of tires surmounted by another statue and a boat that seems to rest on a sea of teardrops. A coin in a slot activates a shower of rain inside the car.
– The Mae West room. Visitors walk past a sitting room to a viewing platform where the furnishings are transformed into a face. The red sofa becomes lips; the fireplace, a nose; the paintings, eyes; the draperies, hair.
– More visual games. Optical illusions, in which subjects dissolve into other images, abound. Included are a painting in which the design reverses to complementary colors when the viewer looks away and stereoscopic photographs that assume a third dimension.
– Theater. Beneath the geodesic dome, a theater stage contains a huge tapestry of a Dali masterwork known popularly as “Lincoln in Dalivision.” Another optic game, its full-length rear-view portrait of Gala against a background of seemingly random checks becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln when viewed through a coin-operated machine. The original was exhibited at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg in 1987.
To the right of the stage is a tapestry of “The Hallucinogenic Toreador.” The original is in St. Petersburg.
On the floor in front of the stage is the unmarked upper surface of Dali’s tomb. Stairs to the lower level, through the Hall of Drawings, take visitors to the crypt incised with the artist’s name, dates (1904 to 1989) and the title “Marques de Dali de Pubol.” The title was bestowed upon him late in life. Pubol is a Gothic-Renaissance castle that Dali bought, restored and gave to Gala. Her body is buried there.
Dali intended to be buried with her. But after his death the mayor of Figueres claimed that Dali had told him during his last days that he wanted to be buried in Figueres. No one contested the statement. The body of Gala may be moved to rest beside him.
Vintage Dali originals exist, though they are upstaged by the melange of objects, reproductions, furnishings, painted ceilings and art by others. Among the Dali works done during the peak of his career (the late 1920s through World War II) are “The Cosmic Athletes,” “Galatea of the Spheres” and “Man With Head Full of Clouds.”
– Art by other artists. On the top floor is a collection of artists whom Dali admired. The range is broad, from Marcel Duchamp, a 20th Century master, to William Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th Century academic. Dali once advised A. Reynolds Morse, founder of the St. Petersburg museum and original owner of most of its works, “Buy Bouguereau.”
– Early paintings by Dali in the styles of Matisse, Picasso and others. Jewel Hall contains a stained glass window, jewelry and other objects designed by Dali.
At the time of Dali’s death, the number of actual works by Dali in the museum was reported to be 116 (including the Mae West room and other assemblages and objects). Another 621 were owned by the foundation.
The artist’s last will left all the works in his possession to the government of Spain in Madrid. A previous will had divided the works between Madrid and Catalonia. By agreement the most significant works have gone to Madrid’s contemporary art museum, 10 works are in Barcelona and the rest have remained in Figueres.
Visitors do not see one part of the museum, the Torre Galatea (Tower of Gala), where Dali lived from 1984 until his death in 1989.
Dali’s spirit seemed to die with Gala in 1982. His personal secretary, Robert Descharnes, interviewed in September at St. Petersburg’s Dali Museum, which he visits periodically, described Dali’s last years. Descharnes also curated the artist’s exhibits and wrote seven books about him.
When a fire broke out in Pubol in 1984, Descharnes saved Dali. After that, Dali moved permanently to the Torre Galatea.
Though his mind remained clear, he refused to eat and was fed baby food through a nose tube. In anger, he sometimes would throw things at the wall, scarring its painted design. Or he would sit in a chair staring aimlessly through a window, oblivious to the crowds outside. And the crowds were unaware that the artist was so close by.
In those last years, Dali’s withdrawal from the world, combined with his power as president of the foundation, brought change at the museum to a standstill.
As if to make up for lost years, today there is a bustle of activity behind the exhibit space. Artistic director Antonio Pitxot is working on a catalog.
Within the building, architects are changing the lighting and air conditioning and are studying ways to make the museum accessible to people with disabilities.
Under renovation are a library, restoration area, study center and storage area.
“Dali was a person who kept everything,” Penuelas says. Though the museum, a non-profit organization, is funded by admissions, the trustees have requested government support for the changes. A nearby building has been bought to handle demands for increased space.
