Dali House

Under the watchful eye of the Dali monument on Es Passeig in Cadaques are Es Maritim bar, the Can Rafa restaurant and the popular disco L’Hostal. Dali used to hang out here at the 1901-vintage Hostal, chatting with rock stars and Nobel prize winners, and even designed its logo. This photo of the entrance is by Xavier Cortina from PBase.com.

He may also have partaken in some lusty scenes in the upstairs rooms in the 1960s, which would account for letting his enthusiasm get away with him when he called it “the most beautiful place on earth”. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Umberto Eco have also been among the customers.

The Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels has in its collection Dali’s 1946 painting “The Temptation of St Anthony” (detail here), a stunning work that was nevertheless among the losing entries in an art competition.

Loew-Lewin Productions wanted a painting of the temptation of St Anthony the Great, known as “the Father of All Monks”, for its planned movie “The Private Affairs of Bel Ami”, starring a very young Angela Lansbury alongside George Sanders. (It was Sanders’ third movie about artists with director Alan Lewin, the others being 1942’s “The Moon and Sixpence” and “The Picture Of Dorian Gray” two years later — all three films are in black and white except for one scene each in which a painting is shown in full colour.)

Eleven top artists were invited to try for the colour shot, and a jury that included Marcel Duchamp picked the piece submitted by Dali’s former co-surrealist Max Ernst. All the entries were later shown together here in Brussels. For his effort, Ernst is immortalised in the film credits on the International Movie Data Base as “Art Department”.

Dali’s version of “The Temptation” has been called the point in his creative life when he decided to be an intermediate between heaven and earth. The elephants on spindly legs describe levitation. The temptation itself is in the power of the rearing horse, the Fountain of Desire on its back, ridden by a naked woman, Bernini’s obelisk, the phallic tower and, in the distant clouds, El Escorial, signifying spiritual and temporal order.

New York dealer Julien Levy bought “The Persistence of Memory” at the 1931 Paris show for $250, calling it “10x14 inches of Dali dynamite”, and loaned it to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, for its year-ending “Newer Super Realism”. Dali’s work was the star of a show that also included Ernst, Miro, de Chirico, Duchamp and Man Ray, and grabbed national headlines.

Levy offered to sell the painting to Atheneum director Chick Austin for $350, but Austin opted instead to buy “La Solitude” (detail here) for $300, making that piece the first Dali painting to enter any museum’s collection. Levy took “The Persistence of Memory” back to his own gallery for a show in January 1932. It still had a busy touring schedule ahead of it over the next few years. During its 1934 exhibition here at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought the painting, one critic urged his readers to “page Dr Freud” if they wanted to decipher its meaning.

Dali himself would come to the Wadsworth — America’s oldest public art museum — in 1934, accompanying another show and giving a lecture on art as well.

As a boy Dali often came to Cap de Creus — the Cape of the Cross, Spain’s most easterly point — on boating trips with his family, taking long walks. The photo here shows the Dali clan on one such outing. He’d watch their friends, the musical Pichot family, perform concerts from their boat moored beneath the cape, a grand piano aboard, which helps explain why the instrument often appeared outdoors in his paintings.

“If I paint grand pianos on cliffs or by cypresses,” he said, “it is by no means a fantastic dream vision — they are things I have seen.”

Seen and participated. As a lad, he recalled, “I espied my first pubic hairs and found expression for my narcissistic desires among the rocks at Cap de Creus. I ecstatically sowed my seed as I masturbated along the coves, creating a sort of erotic Mass between that earth and my body.” Seen here is “Cadaques (Seen from the Tower of Creus)”, from 1923.

In 1930 Dali and Bunuel filmed their second cinematic collaboration, “L’Age d’Or”, here (from a script spun as they told one another their dreams), using the local fishermen as extras. Dali called its rugged seascape “grandiose geological delirium”. The lighthouse here appears in Orson Welles’ “The Light at the Edge of the World”.

Cadaques has attracted artists since the late 1800s, and in Dali’s time Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso came to the haunted coast, not to see him but to create works of art of their own.

Below is “Port Alguer” from 1924.

“Self-portrait with the Neck of Raphael” may have been among the eight works Dali showed in January 1922 as part of a Catalan Students Association group exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries on Barcelona’s Carrer de la Portaferrisa. Below are two other self-portraits also from 1921. Josep Dalmau opened the gallery in 1912, soon after hosted an exhibition of cubist art and even showed Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “Nude Descending a Staircase”.

Dali was ascending with his art, but in October 1923 was suspended from the academy for a year when he fomented a student rebellion against the appointment of a “mediocre” professor of painting. During his downtime Dali returned to Figueres and, with a press purchased for him by his father, learned to make prints. His father also got him thrown in prison: Dali Senior’s political activities resulted in his apolitical son’s arrest, by way of reprisal, and Salvador spent 30 days in a Girona jail. His “criminal record” only came to light in 2004 when the prison archivists were doing some housecleaning.

In November 1925 Dalmau gave Dali his first solo exhibition and Picasso came to see it, and left full of praise.