What is it that makes Spanish artists so...freaky? Goya, Picasso, Miro, Dali, Gaudi: all unique, brilliant, groundbreaking...and bizarre. It was in Figueres, a small town between Barcelona and the French border, that Salvador Dali, master of Surrealism, was born. And it was here, toward the end of his life, that he established the Museo Teatro Dali, "the largest Surrealist object in the world," according to its website. We went, thinking that our nieces, who are fans of Tim Burton, might find it inspiring. They had never seen anything like it, but then, neither had we, nor are we likely to again. Prior glances at The Persistence of Memory and The Last Supper, and reading our friend Isabelle Dufresne's account of her time as Dali's muse in her memoir Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol, had only partially prepared us.
At the same time, having just come from Rome, there was much that we recognized. The gold statues placed in porticoes around the interior courtyard were reminiscent of the Academy Awards, yes, but also of the Colosseum as it originally existed. The ceiling fresco (top) was not unlike one we had seen at the Palazzo Barberini, though the toes are almost comical in their execution. There was a lot of repurposed classical sculpture and imagery: a Venus di Milo with strategically placed drawers that opened and closed, for example, or Odysseus hanging out in a cozy little nook with an octopus.
Salvador Dali was sublimely prolific. Architecture, interior design, sculpture, and, of course, painting and sketching...there was nothing Dali did not dabble in. Note the trompe l'oeil in the picture of the woman reading below. And the image following is of a large room, organized to look like a woman's face. There were also some fascinating things going on with jewels, and contraptions that I cannot begin to categorize.
The man knew how to attract attention, no doubt. But then, we could tell that from the moustaches.
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