Dali Planet #37: Coast of dreams
As a boy Dali often came to Cap de Creus — the Cape of the Cross, Spain’s most easterly point — on boating trips with his family, taking long walks. The photo here shows the Dali clan on one such outing. He’d watch their friends, the musical Pichot family, perform concerts from their boat moored beneath the cape, a grand piano aboard, which helps explain why the instrument often appeared outdoors in his paintings.
“If I paint grand pianos on cliffs or by cypresses,” he said, “it is by no means a fantastic dream vision — they are things I have seen.”
Seen and participated. As a lad, he recalled, “I espied my first pubic hairs and found expression for my narcissistic desires among the rocks at Cap de Creus. I ecstatically sowed my seed as I masturbated along the coves, creating a sort of erotic Mass between that earth and my body.” Seen here is “Cadaques (Seen from the Tower of Creus)”, from 1923.
In 1930 Dali and Bunuel filmed their second cinematic collaboration, “L’Age d’Or”, here (from a script spun as they told one another their dreams), using the local fishermen as extras. Dali called its rugged seascape “grandiose geological delirium”. The lighthouse here appears in Orson Welles’ “The Light at the Edge of the World”.
Cadaques has attracted artists since the late 1800s, and in Dali’s time Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso came to the haunted coast, not to see him but to create works of art of their own.
Below is “Port Alguer” from 1924.
