DALI TRIANGLE

DALÍ TRIANGLE

*By: Catalina Arenas

Landscapes that inspired life and work of this Gerundense artist.

Few artists have had so much connection and fascination for their homeland as Salvador Dalí with the Empordá. He also recognized that the “tramontana” or the north wind, the wind that often lashes this Catalan region, was responsible for his “complete madness”. In the Empordá he was born, lived, created and died. And in this corner of the province of Girona, much of his legacy is exhibited in places that witnessed his life and were scenarios for his inspiration.

To understand Dalí, it is necessary to visit Figueres, the city where he was born and where the young Salvador would spend his youth. He came into the world in 1904 at number 6 of the Monturiol Street, street that, years later, he called with the nickname “street of the geniuses”. Dali was baptized in the church of San Pere, located in the eponymous street, two blocks from his birth home. In the same road is located the Toy Museum of Cataluña where among porcelain dolls, brass cars and zoetropes, there is an exhibition dedicated to the infant Dalí with many family photos and the inseparable teddy bear of the artist: the Marquina bear.

Near the museum is La Rambla, in whose central cafés was the young Dalí spending hours drawing life around. Years later, in one of them, the Emporium coffee, he wrote with Luis Buñuel the script of the film Un Chien Andalou (1929).

When Dalí was young, he made a constant performance of his life and he was never tired of giving free rein to eccentricity. However, the climax of that exhibitionism came with the Theatre of Figueres restructuring and modernization, under his direction, to make it the current Teather-Museum Dalí, in his words: “A true surrealistic object”.

The museum shows a single number of works and times of the artist and includes some of his most acclaimed paintings including:  Self-portrait with fried bacon (1941) and Galatea of the spheres paintings (1952) as well as sculptures, ceramics, prints, photographs, holograms and the extraordinary collection of jewelry designed between 1941 and 1970.

During the teen years of the artist, the Dalí family spent the summer on the Costa Brava, in the picturesque village of Cadaques (35 km). There Salvador had his first painting studio in a fisherman's house next to Port Alghero. In the years he spent in this place was visited by great friends like Garcia Lorca and Buñuel. In this place he met the love of his life, Helena Ivanovna-the world's known as Galatia, who stayed in the Miramar Hotel, actually known as the residence, to spend the summer of 1929.

Dalí paintings reflected in the landscapes he admired so much. The stony terrain of the Costa Brava between Cadaques and the Natural Park of Cap de Creus is found in such works as Girl at the Window (1925) The Spectre of Sex Appeal (1932) or furniture Weaning food (1934). Other no landscape features also became part of the Dalinian universe. Espardenyes for example, the traditional footwear of the region contained in some of his sculptures, jugs and breads pagès that used to introduce into their creations as an allegory of "art as food."

The Ampurdanés Master’s route continues in the fishing village of Portlligat –two kilometers far away of Cadaqués- where Dali and Gala moved in 1949 after his retirement in New York. His house, now converted into a museum, again shows that Dali Surrealism embodied not only in his works, but also in his life. The labyrinthine architecture, the crowded rooms and a kitsch decor, including desiccated polar bear were the love nest and the creative workshop of the couple for more than three decades. Portlligat House Museum just opened a new exhibition space, the Tower Pots, where Dali used to work on their ceramics and sculptures.

From the couple’s fishing house in Portlligat is now continuing into the Empordà to meet other enclaves of the Route Dali. A fifty kilometers we reach the Santuari dels Angels, high on a hill surrounded by pine trees. There, betraying his exhibitionism, Gala and Dalí were married in secret and in the strictest privacy in 1958.

Decades later, the artist's wife wanted to retire from public life so the couple took Pubol Castle, 10 km from the sanctuary, where Gala would move on her 76th birthday. She took care of decorating with a look that reminded her aristocratic Russian origin. The muse of the genius died in 1982 and, after being embalmed, she was buried in the crypt of the castle, dressed in an elegant red Dior dress. Just next, there was another crypt initially conceived to bury Dalí. But it was empty, as the Ampurdanés genius decided, at the end of his days, to rest eternally in the museum of his native Figueres and built a mausoleum in one of the rooms where he was buried in 1989.