Dali House

In May 1978, the same year he underwent prostate surgery in Barcelona, Dali was inducted into the Academie Francaise des Beaux-Arts in Paris as an associate foreign member. The actual initiation, as pictured, took place the following year.

At the same time he was discovering Rene Thom’s theory of catastrophe, and New York’s Guggenheim Museum was displaying his first hyper-stereoscopic painting. Executed in pairs of paintings close to being mirror images, one such work, though left unfinished in 1973, is seen above: “Dali from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalised by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected in Six Real Mirrors”.

In 1979 there was a large retrospective at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, which drew 800,000 visitors, and the following year another at the Tate Gallery in London, but Dali had done enough. His hands shaking and weakened with Parkinson’s disease, he was forced to retire from public life and created little artwork thereafter.

Today the Perrot-Moore Art Centre on Carrer Vigilant in Cadaques has pieces by Dali, Picasso, Caravaggio, Goya and Matisse, but it was once home to the huge collection of Dali artwork amassed by Peter Moore.

The former British Navy and Secret Service officer was a close friend of Dali and Gala from 1960 to ‘75 and served as the artist’s personal secretary and business manager, travelling with him regularly to New York and Paris and doing more than anyone else to expand his creative repertoire and place his work on the market.

In a former incarnation this building was the Miramar Hotel, on whose terrace Dali first met Gala. Moore and his wife Catherine Perrot opened their museum here in 1978, with Gala and Dali in attendance, and lived here until his death in 2005.

Above is a postage stamp that Dali created for France in ‘78.

Moore’s relationship with Dali soured with the advent of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, however, and then in 1999 police raided his home and Moore was charged in connection with forged Dali prints. At Moore’s suggestion, Dali had signed thousands of blank sheets of paper that were then printed with so-called “limited editions” of lithographs and sold. That, and the fact that Dali varied his signature regularly, produced a torrent of fakes that unhinged the art market and threatened to shrivel the value of his genuine pieces.

Little came of the charges, ostensibly because Moore was in his 80s, but when hundreds of the works from his collection were auctioned off in 2003, more trouble appeared.

The sale enabled him to reconcile with photographer and Dali authority Robert Descharnes, another intimate friend of the artist with whom Moore had feuded, but the following year Moore was accused of reducing the size of Dali’s 1969 painting “The Double Image of Gala” — stolen from New York’s Knoedler Gallery in 1974 and rediscovered here at his home-gallery in 1999 — and showing it publicly under a different name. A court ordered him and his wife to pay the Dali foundation more than $1 million in compensation.

In 1977 the Andre-Francois Petit Gallery on Rue Faubourg St Honore in Paris exhibited Dali’s latest works, including the famous trompe l’oeil “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Metres Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln — Homage to Rothko”.

The photo below shows the artist as he appeared in the last Pathe newsreel ever made, in 1970. The strange spectacles he’s holding are perhaps those he sometimes wore at the St Regis Hotel: Each eyepiece had two levels of glass, between which he inserted crumbs of food — or ants, memorably — to get a different perspective on the world.

A decade earlier Dali was wearing in his Catalan beret an “electrocular monocle” developed by an aeronautics company. It transmitted images that could be viewed simultaneously with one’s surroundings. Dali also sought to invent a kind of contact lens filled with fluid that would register images even during sleep. The 1963 painting below, “Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger”, has been referred to as “The Electrocular Monocle and the Paranoiac”.

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Madrid’s 17th-century Plaza Mayor, with its equestrian statue of King Philip III, has hosted fiestas, bullfights, royal coronations, executions and, for a while in the 1970s, Salvador and Gala Dali, who had an apartment here. Seen above is his “Plaza Mayor (Duel in the Sun)”.

The village of Selva de Mar has a bar called El Celler de la Selva that Dali purportedly visited regularly in the early 1970s — on occasion, and on request, autographing women’s bottoms. It has a bronze sculpture he supposedly made of a man’s arm thrust up.

In 1973 Dali produced a lavish cookbook entitled “Les Diners de Gala”, borrowing from the illustrations published in the 100-year-old classic “Le Livre de cuisine”, and the BBC came to Port-Lligat to make a documentary about him, “Hello Dali”. Soon after, however, Dali began suffering major health problems, even though he had many great artworks still ahead of him.

Below is Dali’s “Transformation of Antiques Magazine Cover into the Apparition of a Face” from 1974, which really was the magazine’s cover for one issue that year.