Dali House

In 2004 plans were announced for an ambitious Dali museum in Prague, which was to have perched on the embankment at the foot of Revolucni Street. On what would have been Dali’s 100th birthday, local art dealer Miro Smolak and American architect Daniel Libeskind of World Trade Center fame unveiled a proposal for a $25.7-million, seven-storey “Palace of Art Prague”.

The painting here is “Exploded Head” from 1982.

The Czech National Gallery bridled, since Dali had no connection to Prague and little influence on Czech art. Smolak pointed out, to no avail, that St Petersburg, Florida, had no Dali connection either but today hosts the world’s most comprehensive Dali collection.

The 12th-century Bodenstein Castle in Norvenich, Germany, rebuilt in the 1700s, is headquarters of the European Art Foundation for the Promotion of Art and Science and, as such, the repository of a growing Dali archive, established in 1984.

In 2004, the centenary of Dali’s birth, Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe opened the Royal Dali Collection here. The photo above shows him holding a rendition of Dali’s soft watch made from sugar and marzipan.

The castle, which once had the Emperor Charlemagne as an overnight guest, was in 1970 earmarked to serve as a guest house of the West German government, but in 1980 the Bodenstein family bought the edifice and made it a centre of culture.

The march of time rescued Dali’s name from the gloom of the courtroom. In 2004, the centenary of his birth, there were retrospectives and celebrations in cities around the globe, Spain’s King Juan Carlos officially igniting “The Year of Dali” with the exhibition “Dali and Mass Culture” here at the Caixa Forum. The same show travelled from here to Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the Dali Museum in Florida and Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. In September 2005 there was another huge Dali exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The paintings here is “Celestial Ride” from 1957.

Yugoslav Dragan Matic unveiled centenary plans to stage “Etre Dieu”, an “opera-poem” written by Dali, in Barcelona.

Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca began writing the libretto in 1927 at a Madrid cafe, and in 1974 Dali recorded the opera in Paris with music by Igor Wakhevitch and additional lyrics by Spaniard Manuel Vazquez Montalban, but insisted on improvising on the text, saying “Salvador Dali never repeats himself!” I’ve been unable to find any indication online that the revival of “Etre Dieu” was realised.

In 1986 the City of Madrid opened Plaza de Dali. Guidebooks and websites have little to say about it despite the square being occupied by his one-tonne sculpture “Homage to Newton”, dubbed “a salute to gravity”. Google Earth users can find a Sketchup model of the plaza, created by “Demian”, here.

This was not a good period for the Dali legacy. For years every mention of his name in the papers seemed to involve litigation. In 1986 a New York grand jury indicted seven people for misrepresenting Dali copies as lithographs. The following year the owners of the Shelby Fine Arts Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were convicted of fraud, criminal conspiracy and criminal solicitation over the sale of Dali graphics, and a Manhattan couple were found guilty on similar charges in a separate case.

In 1990 the Hawaiian conmen William Mett and Marvin Wiseman were convicted in history’s largest art-scam trial, a five-month marathon in which Dali’s memory was repeatedly shamed for his own avarice.

For all the anguish in the art market over whether Dali prints were really Dali prints, his paintings’ value soared. In 1987 Japanese investors paid $2.3 million for “Lincoln in Dalivision“, a version of “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea”, and soon after that, $2.4 million for “The Battle of Tetuan”.

In 1989 it was an acutely altered world that took another long look at Dali at two major retrospectives at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, 350 works in all, reflecting a social order in flux over the decades of the 20th century.

In 1943 he painted “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man”, the fresh species of the title emerging from the global egg via a crack that seems to have swallowed America, or perhaps made room for its entrance.

Europe is within his grasp and the swollen Third World waits. The wizened, androgynous figure on the right instructs an infant on the new scheme of things, the child casting a far longer shadow than his forebear and muse.