Dali House

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.

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.

I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”

For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.

There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.

How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle. See the rest.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour. See the rest.

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.