Mi casa loca
Port Lligat, Spain — In the foyer is an enormous stuffed bear. This tribute to the taxidermist’s art holds a lamp, and can also double as an umbrella stand. If the sight of the beast so startles you that you fall backward, you will land on a sofa in the shape of a giant pair of lips.
Welcome to Dalí-land, which is to perversity what Disney is to wholesomeness. Beginning in 1930, Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, spent four decades working on this compound of fishing shacks on the Costa Brava, close to the village of Cadaqués in the northeast corner of Spain, where the artist spent much of his youth.
The couple turned the ramshackle buildings into one of the world’s most eccentric residences, a series of whitewashed shapes climbing a rugged hillside. The swimming pool is in the shape of a phallus. At the end of the pool is a shell-shaped niche with a pair of fantasy thrones, where the rulers of this kingdom sat, watching their guests drink pink champagne. Nearby is a structure called the ‘‘Dovecote of the Pitchforks,’’ a tall cylinder with huge pitchforks sticking out of it rather threateningly, as if to protect the giant egg perched on the peak of the red tile roof, or perhaps the doves that roosted within. Next to the house is an ancient, frail wooden boat with a large cypress growing through it, evidence that nature was the first Surrealist.
The inside of the house is a labyrinth. The layout is weird; the con- At one end of a phallus-shaped pool, Dalí arranged illustrations from a Pirelli tires ad campaign around a couch of lips on which he sometimes posed for his visitors. A treasure of strange objects is housed in his Port Lligat seaside residence. tents, even weirder. Eyeing the jumble of dismembered mannequins, religious icons, Dalí’s reinterpretations of the work of other artists, and collections of stones, shells, starfish, as well as manmade kitsch, you wonder if there were any category of object that did not interest Dalí and Gala. His was a mind that needed constant replenishment, whether from the visible world or from the ideas of thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Federico García Lorca.
The house is, in a sense, his masterpiece, with staircases that go nowhere, oddly shaped doors, and a pair of stuffed swans that guard the library. Dalí (1904-89) was passionate about taxidermy, seeing it as a route to immortality, as ancient Egyptians had seen mummification.
In the bedroom, a large mirror is positioned at an angle that allowed the artist to see the sun rise without getting out of bed. There’s only one bedroom (overnight visitors were not encouraged) with two beds and two bathrooms. Separate beds and bathrooms may help account for the durability of the relationship between the artist and his muse. After all, if you had to pose for him all day, you might want a bit of privacy later.
In 1997, eight years after Dalí’s death, the compound reopened as the Salvador Dalí House-Museum, a place of pilgrimage for the artist’s fans. They’re are still celebrating the 2004 the centennial of their maverick hero’s birth, which was marked by a huge exhibition in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, that most surreal of cities. The exhibition is now (through May 15) at its only other venue, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (215-763- 8100, www.philamuseum.org), in a city that is sensible rather than surreal. You didn’t catch the The signers of the Declaration of Independence hosting parties like the dinner Dalí gave with a fish course delivered in satin slippers and a main course of frogs — live frogs.
Dalí was obsessed with celebrity. He loved being around the rich, the famous, the powerful. His obsession is expressed on the doors of his dressing room, which are plastered with photos of him and Gala with luminaries including actors Ingrid Bergman and Lawrence Olivier, Walt Disney, and Pope John XXIII, along with the famous Man Ray photograph of him that graced the Dec. 14, 1936, cover of Time magazine.
Dalí and Gala were the stars of any event they attended, wearing outrageous outfits (a jeweled eyeball, say, or a headdress made of bread, or a hat in the shape of a shoe) and performing outrageous acts. After the management of the chic New York department store Bonwit Teller made some changes in the window designs they had commissioned from Dalí, his response was to push a bathtub lined with Persian lamb, one of the props he had used in the display, right through the window. This bit of naughtiness got him arrested and only added to his fame.
But the artist also craved the peace and privacy of Port Lligat, where he worked at a fiendish pace.
Its rocky setting appears in Dalí’s most famous painting, ‘‘The Persistence of Memory.’’ Against shredded-looking rocks and a never- setting sun are those celebrated watches in meltdown, draped over a barren tree or an amorphous, quasi-human form. The inspiration for the flaccid watches? A particularly runny Camembert cheese.
Over the centuries, the fierce wind sculpted Port Lligat’s rocks and trees into surreal shapes long before the term ‘‘Surrealism’’ was coined. These forms are often directly related to the shapes in Dalí’s paintings.
Port Lligat feels like the end of the earth, but going there helps even the most mystified visitor understand something of Dalí, just as a visit to Giverny does in the case of Claude Monet. In his authoritative book ‘‘Barcelona’’ (Vintage, 1993), art critic Robert Hughes writes that it is impossible to understand Dalí, Joan Miró, and the great architect Antoni Gaudí, all Catalan-born, without visiting Catalonia, which has a distinct culture quite separate from the rest of Spain. For instance, the usual Holy Family figures turn up in Catalonia’s Christmas crèches, with one additional cast member unique to the area: the ‘‘caganer,’’ a shepherd who is defecating just as the Messiah arrives. Hughes credits the caganer for inspiring the excremental imagery that so often appears in Dalí’s paintings, and credits Dalí with identifying Gaudí’s woozy, undulating Barcelona buildings as forerunners of Surrealism. Dalí was particularly fond of Gaudí’s drinking fountain in the Placa de Tetuan. It’s in the shape of breasts, with water gushing out of the nipples.
Barcelona is where most people begin the Dalí trail. It has Catalonia’s biggest airport, and a day or two of looking at Gaudí is good preparation for heading north. Pause in the lovely medieval city of Girona, with its beguiling array of shops and restaurants. Then head for the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figueres, and farther north, visit Port Lligat. End the trip by turning south to the Castell Gala Dalí, the medieval castle in Pubol that Dalí gave Gala as a private retreat where she lived during the 1970s. She resisted his tweaking of the severe stone building, but he managed such touches as metal radiator covers he painted with trompe l’oeilcq radiators.
The Teatre-Museu Dalí is startling at every turn. It was the ruin of an 1849 theater that had burned during the Spanish Civil War. It is across the street from the Church of St. Pere, where the artist was baptized, and it was the setting, in 1919, for the first public showing of his precocious art. Dalí decided it was destined to become a monument to himself, a museum in no traditional sense, but ‘‘a total Surrealist object,’’ as he put it.
The fun begins in the courtyard. A black Cadillac with a serpent goddess standing on top dominates the outdoor space. Put a one Euro coin in a slot and it starts raining — inside the car. Golden mannequins atop the building overlook the courtyard; they were based on the shape of Hollywood’s Oscar statuette. Keeping them company are Dalí’s signature giant eggs.
People stuck on Dalí as exhibitionist forget his technical mastery, which the museum in Figueres records in such works as the 1945 ‘‘Basket of Bread,’’ painted with cool precision.
There’s also the showmanship, the images of Gala and Mae West so blown up that Gala becomes a corridor you can walk through, while Mae’s face expands to fill an entire room. Her pouty lips are a sofa; her nostrils, hearths.
Gala and Dalí are together eternally in his art. In several paintings, he cast Gala as the Virgin Mary and himself as the Christ Child. After her death in 1982, he painted a version of Michelangelo’s ‘‘Pieta’’ with Gala as the mourning mother and himself as the dead Christ, draped over her lap.
There was also a plan to be together forever quite literally. In Gala’s house in Pobul are two tombs, with round holes cut in each, so Gala and Dalí could hold hands until Judgment Day. She is in one of them. He is not in the other. He ultimately decided he wanted to be buried in his museum in Figueres, under a giant glass cupola that was his way of refuting the rigid rectilinear style of much modernist architecture.
He had been planning an extension to the museum. Did he think he could monitor its progress from the afterlife if he stayed on site? It’s fun to fantasize about Dalí directing the project from the grave, perhaps over a telephone — his famous one with the red lobster handle.
Christine Temin can be reached at temin@globe.com.
