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.

In Palma de Mallorca, the Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani has Dali’s “Composition” hanging in the same room as treasures by Picasso, Miro and Gris. This is the wistful “Figure at a Window”, from 1925.

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There are several museums in Madrid that together form an “Art Walk” with works by Dali figuring prominently. The Museo Thyssen Bornemisza — home since 1992 to the eclectic Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection — has “Pierrot with Guitar” (1923-24) and, at right, “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate”, from 1944.

There are several museums in Madrid that together form an “Art Walk” with works by Dali figuring prominently. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, seen below in a Google Earth image, is home to many of his works. Above is “The Basket of Bread”, from 1926, an astonishingly realistic depiction. The museum also has “The Great Masturbator” (1929), “Portrait of Luis Bunuel” (1924), “Cubist Self-Portrait” (1923) and “Girl Standing at the Window” (1925).

Dalí returned to the bakery in 1945 for another delectable work, also called “The Basket of Bread”, in which some commentators see more of the “rich symbolism attached to bread” and wax poetic about the doughy ornamentation at the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueras.

Dalí once commissioned the celebrated Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne to make him a bread frame for a painting, then several chairs and then a four-poster bed. “It was beautiful,” Poilâne recalled years later. The colour was so intense — a brown, woody shade. I made a spectacular bird cage for him with a real bird inside. The bird ate his way out and flew away. It was very poetic.”

Dalí’s reaction: “Poilâne, he is the living Frenchman that I prefer.”

The baker had his own artistic inventiveness, and hung bread chandeliers, complete with electrical fittings, in both of his stores. The original shop, founded by his father in 1932, remains at 8 rue de la Cherche-Midi, though Lionel died with his wife when the helicopter he was piloting crashed off the coast of Brittany in 2002. The official website of his shop, now run by his daughter, is here, and the Wikipedia entry on him here.