Monster Love
Dalí and the Costa Brava
This year’s many centenary celebrations offer some refreshing perspectives on the legacy of Surrealism. Twelve hundred kilometres south of Brussels, in the sun-drenched countryside of his native Catalonia, Salvador Dalí reimagined the landscape of an entire region, far beyond his canvas.
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme. Although Bretonian surrealism no longer figures so monolithically in academic discourse and the popular imagination – with due attention being paid in recent decades to the fractures, divergences and defections, as well as the geographical diversity, that marked the movement’s early years – there is still good reason to hold on to 1924 as a pivotal year. Yvan Goll’s Manifeste du Surréalisme was published just a few weeks before Breton’s, and in the same year Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte founded the magazine Correspondence, thus inventing Belgian surrealism.
This February, amid the manifold centenary celebrations unfolding in the Belgian capital (including a richly informative show dedicated to Belgian surrealism in Bozar and the exhibition ‘Imagine: 100 Years of International Surrealism’ at the Royal Museums of Fine Art), and driven southward by the inexorably bleak weather, I alighted in the more salubrious environs of the Costa Brava, on the north-eastern coast of Catalonia. I endeavoured to spend the better part of a week bouncing around the Dalínian triangle (or at least two corners of it), comprising the Salvador Dalí House-Museum in Portlligat, the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres and the Castle of Púbol, where Gala (Dalí’s wife) is buried.
What better place to start than the place where it literally all began for Dalí? In Figueres, Dalí’s city of birth, there are more than a few significant landmarks for the dilettante-pilgrim: Hotel Duran, a mystifying bastion of old-world hospitality and opulence in the sleepy-seeming city centre, whose owners knew the Dalí family; the Casa Natal, site of Dalí’s childhood home; and the Dali Theatre-Museum, standing on the ruins of the former municipal theatre of Figueres: glass-domed, egg-adorned, it is still the most consistently impressive Gesamtkunstwerk that Dalí ever completed.
The Casa Natal only opened last Autumn. After years of development, it is now an interactive museum replete with cutting-edge technology that ‘brings Dalí’s story to life’. The stated mission of the museum is to illuminate Dalí’s personal life in relation to his public persona. Expecting a conventional, if perhaps cheekily ‘surrealist’ biographical tour, I was instead treated to a blitzed-out, audio-guided immersive experience, replete with ‘holograms and talking windows, video mappings and visual effects, giant kaleidoscopes and immersive landscapes’. What would Dalí have made of the spectacle of his biography, evoked in every available medium? He might have found it a tad too tame. For my part, despite the dubious premise – the risk being that the entertainment-value eclipses the substance and nuance of the story – the wealth of archival material arrayed and the serious scholarship underpinning it all make the Casa Natal a worthwhile stop, especially as a complement to the Dalí Theatre-Museum down the road.
With the Tramuntana wind at my back, I sashayed along the Pujada del Castell until, rounding a corner, a familiar brick-red tower loomed. The Dalí Theatre-Museum, more than any other single artwork, is Dalí’s masterpiece. A ‘great surrealist object’ of astounding proportions, it is the total embodiment of Dalí’s artistic vision, the ultimate testament to his sensibility. Having paid spontaneous tribute to Dalí’s tomb beneath the stage of the former theatre (directly under the museum’s iconic geodesic glass dome), I revelled in the temporary exhibition ‘Dalí. The Christ of Portlligat’. The Christ (1951), one of Dalí’s most remarkable mid-career oil paintings, depicts a crucifixion in imaginary space, with a Christ angled forward. Strikingly, the face is entirely concealed, viewed almost entirely from above, and without the nails or stigmata, the picture seems to dispense with any religious iconography of suffering. The suspended Christ figure occupies only the upper third of the canvas, while the cross extends down to the midpoint. In the bottom half of the picture, materialising out of the darkness like a dream, is an apparently serene landscape: the bay of Portlligat, the ‘vital topography’ of Dalí’s youth. The painting had not been in Spain since 1952 and would, by itself, have justified an excursion to Figueres.
The final destination of my Dalínian pilgrimage – with a much-deserved stop to relish the local wine product at the Brugarol winery, with its impressive semi-underground cellar designed by RCR Arquitectes – was the Salvador Dalí House-Museum in Portlligat, in the municipality of Cadaqués. Even before Dalí established a primary residence there for himself and Gala, Portlligat had figured in some of European art history’s most famous biographies (residents have included Duchamp and Picasso). During my visit, tours of the house and grounds were punctuated by visits to local art establishments; on a lazy afternoon, I dropped by the artist Alicia Cayuela’s studio (her recent collection of poems Monsterlove is disarmingly beautiful) and Patrick Domken Gallery, where works by the Japanese artist Koyama were on view.
So why go see Dalí – his erstwhile habitations, his country, his real-life works – besides the fact that it’s the 120th anniversary of his birth? The relevant question here is: how well do you want to know Dalí? There are more than a few reasons to undertake such a trip (especially if one is young and untraveled). Firstly, Dalí had a special relationship with the region from which he came; it not only made him, he also made it – by identifying with it, living in it and bequeathing to it a mythology, a museum and a repository of some of his most significant works. Second, the wealth of scholarship and works concentrated here offer a unique opportunity to develop a multidimensional understanding of a figure who so often is flattened by canonisation. Personally, this consisted of welcome reminders concerning the breadth of his output: writings, commercials (in the 60s and 70s), magazine covers, jewellery, theatre sets, performances, sculpture, video … as well as the opportunity to assess the full arc of his development, from gifted and voracious young painter to public artist and, finally, self-orchestrated legend. My time at the Casa Natal also delivered fresh insights about Dalí as producer of a global brand, the commercial machine that was the intended corollary of his carefully crafted public persona. By any standards, Dalí was staggeringly prolific in his lifetime.
Finally, it this landscape, its air, its culture, its past, that unlocks a seemingly crucial key to the artist and the core motifs in his art. It’s in the way the atmosphere wisps clouds into hazy plateaus, the way the oxidisation levels in the air make lines on the horizon appear clear and sharp, or mountains burnished with bright gradients. The places in his paintings really looked that way – Dalí’s greatest feat was to combine this with revenant visions from the torrent of his unconscious, thus creating landscapes that are more real, and more unsettling, than anything delivered by pure ‘psychic automatism’.
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