Dali House

The Great One meets the Divine Dali, and though they seem to be keeping their distance in the photo, Dali actually designed the sleeve for one of Jackie Gleason’s easy-listening albums, “Lonesome Echo”.

The album came out in 1955, but for lack of further details about the king of TV’s collaboration with the sultan of surrealism, I’ve taken the liberty of placemarking on Google Earth the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami, from where Gleason later broadcast his weekly variety show.

The Huntington Hartford Gallery was on Columbus Circle in Manhattan (later to become the Gallery of Modern Art) in 1959 when it commissioned “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”, the most famous of the monumental paintings that Dali was at this stage creating annually during his summers in Port-Lligat. Shown here is a detail; click for the whole image.

Now at the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, “Discovery of America” is more than 14 feet tall, features Gala in full Madonna mode and someone who looks a lot like Dali planting the banner, and borrows heavily from Velasquez.

Columbus, Dali insists here, was a fellow Catalonian.

In Llafranch, a seaside town close to the French border, the Hotel Llafranch was opened here on Passeig Cipsela by the brothers Jose, Mario and Manuel Bisbe in 1958, and soon had among its guests Kirk Douglas, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren — and Salvador Dali. In more recent years it has hosted Antonio Banderas and Margaret Thatcher.

On August 8, 1958, Dali and Gala were married in a religious ceremony (their 1934 service was a civil one) at Els Angels in Sant Marti Vell. Other sources say the nuptials took place at the “Capella de la Mare de Deu dels Angels”, but this seems like a mistranslation and, anyway, the shrine of Els Angels — 485 metres up with a panoramic view all across Catalonia — is a regular destination for Catalonian pilgrims, as well as schoolchildren on day trips.

History tracks the shrine back as far as 1424, but it was wrecked on several occasions, including in the 1710 war of independence and during the civil war in 1936.
Having painted women with heads (and wombs) formed of roses, Dali rendered a realistic blossom in 1958’s “Meditative Rose”, below, complete with a raindrop on a petal.