The Salvador Dalí House in Portlligat, the third vertex of the Dalí triangle formed by the Figueres Theater Museum and the Púbol castle that the surrealist painter dedicated to Gala, his muse, was the couple’s place of residence for 52 years, except for the seasons spent abroad.
It was also the only stable studio of the artist, a place where outstanding works of the surrealist period emerged, such as the oil painting Portrait of Gala with two ribs balanced on her shoulder, from 1934, as well as iconic works from the 1950s and 1960s such as The Christ, Asunta corpuscularia lapislazulina or The discovery of America. With Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí closed the house and moved to Púbol.
The artist’s workshop house, which today marks the 25th anniversary of its definitive opening to the public, is hosting an exhibition of photographs taken between the years 1930 and 1980 in which the couple and the artist can be seen in different rooms and outdoor spaces of what was his home for more than five decades.
There are 19 snapshots, two of them unpublished, located as close as possible to the scenes where they were taken, taken by various authors such as Batlles-Compte, Melitó Casals ‘Meli’, Juan Gyenes, Oriol Maspons, Pietro Pascuttini, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Ricardo Sans and Robert Whitaker.
In these images you can see the couple in different places such as on the terrace or in the small fisherman’s shack that became their refuge after Dalí broke up with his family. Both are snapshots from 1931, when Dalí was only 27 years old.
The genius also appears painting in the olive grove area, an image from 1948; absorbed in the work Gala Placidia, in his workshop, in 1952 or holding a photograph of an adolescent Gala in 1980.
The exhibition, which can be visited until September 30, “wants to bear witness to the atmosphere that was breathed in that place when Dalí and Gala lived there,” according to the foundation.
The director of the Dalí museums, Montse Aguer, explained this afternoon that the photographs chosen for this exhibition, taken from the fund of more than 16,000 photos of the foundation, “show the evolution of the house and at the same time the evolution of Dalí and of Gala”.
Each image is accompanied by a QR code, in which Dalí’s words about Portlligat are reproduced, which appear in some of his works such as the autobiographical La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí or Confesiones inconfesables, with the voices of Jordi Boixaderas (Catalan and Spanish) Rob Paterson (English) and Eric Bonicatto (French).
To give some examples, in the photograph of a couple on the terrace, located in the gardens of the house with views of the Portlligat bay, one of the fragments of The Secret Life is reproduced.
“…We were going to build the first steps of the paranoid-critical method; we were going to continue that beautiful and tragic task of living together, of living for the reality of the two of us alone”.
In the photo that appears inside the shack, the QR code reproduces a description of that first home, tiny, 22 square meters without electricity and running water. “I wanted it to be so small, the smaller the more intrauterine.”
Del Dalí photographed next to the dovecote, one of the dependencies of the house, crowned by an egg and decorated with gallows, Dalí refers to these gallows as “the essential instruments to keep my weak notion of reality in balance.”
Another of the exhibition’s stopping points is the Christ of the rubble, which he made with different rejected materials that the sea brought to the beach after a storm. A sculptural work 12 meters long, with a boat as a trunk and a war mine as a head.
“When Dalí talks about this work, it is as if we were listening to an environmentalist last week,” said the president of the entity, Jordi Mercader, who added that the exhibition reflects “everyday life, personal humanism and the great mysticism of Dalí in Portlligat “.
Portlligat, located in the heart of the Cap de Creus Natural Park, was the place where the couple went in the 1930s, after a young Salvador Dalí was expelled from the family nucleus. The trigger was the inscription on a drawing exhibited in a Paris gallery: ‘Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure’. His father did not forgive him for the offense, disinherited him and kicked him out of the house.
Dalí started from scratch with Gala. With the sale of the painting Old Age by William Tell to the Viscount of Noailles, he acquired a fisherman’s shack in the Bay of Portlligat that belonged to Lídia Noguer, a fishmonger, the daughter of fishermen, who had become the muse of many artists.
That small space, measuring 22 square meters, over time was the object of successive reforms and extensions to satisfy the creative needs of Salvador Dalí.
Overlooking the bay of Portlligat and the island of Sa Farnera, he installed a mechanism that allowed him to paint large canvases sitting in his armchair, while Gala whispered readings selected for him.
That barrack is today a space of 552 square meters built, to which we must add the outdoor areas, also visitable, such as patios and gardens.
The tour of the house allows the visitor to see up to 3,000 objects that allow a better understanding of how the artist lived and worked. Among them, there are works created by the artist, such as the installation El Cristo de los Dembros or the heads of Cástor and Pollux, work tools, such as brushes, varnishes or palettes, furniture such as the iconic sofa-lips or clothing, such as clothing, accessories or shoes from designers such as Paco Rabanne, Christian Dior or Pierre Cardin, among others.
It also includes the dovecote, the Torre de las Ollas (a circular hut that was used as an additional workshop to create sculptures and as a stage for ephemeral artistic manifestations), the Leveroni hut, the garage and a viewpoint located on top of the hill, which has with six-legged chairs, like the one used by Dalí, for the rest of the visitors.
