Dali House

“Girl from the Back”, also now at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid, was among the works that so impressed Picasso at Dali’s 1925 exhibition in that city. Borrowing German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s habit of rendering subjects from behind, Dali’s depiction of his sister, rigid and softly hued, was what he called “saintly objectivity” and already evokes the dream state.

Dali’s Academy classmate Federico Garcia Lorca visited him in Figueras in April 1925 and, having won the hearts of Dali’s father and sister by reading them his poems, accompanied his friend to ancient Girona to see the cathedral during the Holy Week celebrations. Catedral de Girona, known as La Seu, has the widest Gothic nave in mediaeval architecture and vast Baroque steps leading up to it.

In November Lorca came back for another visit, this time bringing with him “Didactic Ode to Salvador Dali” (published the following year without the adjective in the title): “Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-coloured voice / I do not praise your halting adolescent brush / Or your pigments that flirt with the pigments of your time / But I laud your longing for eternity with limits.”

“When Lorca tried seduce me,” Dali wrote afterward, “I refused with horror.”

The Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art in Valladolid displays five sketches from 1934 for Dali’s stunning anti-war masterpiece “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)”. The painting itself hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.