Dali House

This post is the final one in Dali House’s “Dali Planet” biography, based on my Google Earth tour of key places in the artist’s life. Can you believe this has been an almost-daily dalliance with Dali since the series began last July?

It is, I maintain, among the most comprehensive Dali biographies available for free online, and yet in the course of its publishing here even more information has come to light. Much of this I am inserting into existing posts but, while I mull the chances of a “second edition”, I urge true fans of the maestro to visit (or, better still, join) the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, some of whose members personally met Dali and/or worked in his sphere, and all of whom have interesting information to share. There you discover that Dali does, in fact, live on.

(Oh, uh, the Dali neckties are sold online here.)

“This picture, because of its size,” Dalí told Robert Descharnes of “Santiago el Grande”, “was destined to know many mishaps.”

Once completed, the window of his studio at the Port Lligat house had to be enlarged to allow the canvas to be moved out, and then it had to be carted by truck rather than train to Le Havre for shipment to New York, where an exhibition was waiting at the Carstairs Gallery.

A crane was hired to hoist the painting up to the second-floor gallery, whose owner, George Keller, fretted that no one would ever buy so big an artwork. Once it did find a home, in the Beaverbrook collection in New Brunswick, Canada, the scale of the work ensured that it would never move again.

The Museo de Cadaques on Carrer de Narcis Monturiol displays rotating art exhibits, many including works by Dali, though which ones is not clear. Shown here, along with a photo of Dali painting a bird figurine, is “The Harmony of the Spheres” from 1978.

Within view of Es Passeig is the islet of El Cucurucuc, in whose triangular shape some people fancy seeing a rhinoceros horn, some a toreador’s cap and some the bread loaves called pa de crostons that were once ubiquitous in Catalonia. Dali saw all three at once, and repeatedly used them as symbols in his paintings of the little island and other scenes real and imagined.

Above is one of his earliest renditions, “The Bay at Cadaques, with Cucurucuc Rock and the Sortell Peninsula”, from 1920.

A photo of the Cafe Meliton on Cadaques’ El Passeig by Hamburg artist Art Collart from his website. Guests of the the cafe sit among mementoes of Marcel Duchamp, who took refuge in the scenic seaside town and sometimes dined there with Dali in the early days.

It was the bar’s owner, Meliton Casals, who took snapshots at Dali and Gala’s 1958 wedding. Duchamp is remembered playing chess almost every day there with the local fishermen and occasional special guests, among them John Cage.

“When Duchamp realised that he had scattered the ideas of his youth to the winds, until he himself was left with none,” Dali observed, “he most aristocratically declined to play the game, and prophetically announced that other young men were specialising in the chess match of contemporary art; and then he began to play chess.”