12th house
08-10-2007, 04:01 PM
I didn't think this would last too long in the main forum, so I'm putting it here. This article's best point is made at the end so please persevere and read!
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The legacy of a surrealist showman
By Patrick FrenchPublished: August 4 2007 01:24 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:24
The Spanish make a lot of Salvador Dalí and he left a lot for them to make a fuss about. What other artist has left so many fascinating, absurd photographs of himself for posterity? All along the wild, craggy Catalan coast, in the town squares and the village bars, you can see pictures and posters of the moustachioed surrealist: Dalí communing with a live octopus, Dalí sitting in state wearing a crown, a goggle-eyed Dalí with his moustache tips pointing towards heaven, Dalí and his wife Gala looking respectable.
For most of his life, Dalí lived in a splendid, bizarre house of his and Gala’s creation, overlooking the harbour in Port Lligat, a little fishing village near Cadaqués in north-east Spain, near the French border. When he died in 1989, it was preserved with reverence by a foundation, and turned into a museum. This is not any old museum. You have to book a visit by telephone, turn up 30 minutes before your appointed tour time and endure being shuffled through the labyrinth of rooms at speed by unsympathetic guides. Dalí and Gala, a notably creepy and grasping couple, are sanitised: a round echo chamber lined with banquettes where male guests would have sex while Dalí watched from an external alcove, is described as a “dressing-room”. Really?, I asked the bored attendant with the name-badge and the walkie-talkie. “It is Gala’s dressing-room. Only for Gala.”
Lying on the banquettes, having seen a lot, were some little stuffed toys: a rhino, a lion, a lamb, a deer and a startled squirrel.Although wacky homes are now less rare than they would have been in the 1930s, you still feel a sense of shock at Dalí’s style and imagination when you enter the house at Port Lligat. The surrounding landscape is conventionally stunning – a cobalt blue bay, rustling pine trees, steep hillsides hacked by wind. The house itself is full of surprises. A stuffed polar bear greets you in the hall beside a crossbow, an old wind-up telephone and a sofa shaped like Mae West’s lips. In neighbouring rooms, smart traditional furniture is juxtaposed with unexpected sights such as a rhino’s head, stuffed swans on top of a bookcase, sprouting ram’s horns and a dried, deadly puffer-fish baring its fangs on a ledge. The legs of a stool turn out to be the delicate legs of a real deer. Teddy bears and quaint toys appear all over the house. Matchbox-sized bamboo cages hang, each one once home to a cicada – Dalí liked the noise of the captured insects. A ceiling is taken over by a huge, exquisite, splayed Japanese umbrella.
The studio at the heart of the house gives the strongest impression of something more than play. It is Dalí’s place of work, where his ideas unfurled. A picture window reveals the splendour of the bay and lets in natural light and the Tramontana, the savage local wind; a pair of spectacles with variegated lenses lie on an easel near an ecclesiastical bench; a pulley system lowers the finished canvases through the floor.Down a few steps you see a mirror positioned carefully to reflect the mannequins or the real models, who stood in an adjacent room.So much of Dalí’s painting abruptly becomes clear here: the religious iconography is taken from the Spanish Catholicism that surrounded him, the sexual imagery comes from his own voyeuristic obsessions, the surreal shapes in his pictures precisely match the rough, hollowed rocks of the Catalan coast. Another mirror is positioned on the far side of a different room to be visible from Dalí’s bed, so that he, and only he, could see the sunrise.
Above the house, on a hillside of olive trees, lies a trail of rubbish that you realise with a jump is an artistic rendition of a broken human body, or skeleton, the remains of a boat making the ribcage. The aerial view you expect of Dalí’s phallic swimming pool is not available on this guided tour. Instead, passing a pair of giant white coffee cups, you approach it at ground level, making it seem like nothing more than a long, thin place to swim. The swollen right testicle becomes a circular, azure pool edged in herringbone brickwork. At the head of the pool – guarded by huge, disturbing, stuffed cloth snakes – stands a glass rocket and a pair of thrones draped in white fabric.As the busy guides whisk you through the house, you have glimpses of the Dalís’ normal or abnormal life: Johnson’s Baby Powder on a ledge in the high-ceilinged bathroom, a connecting room wallpapered with photographs and cuttings of Dalí being Dalí on the cover of Time, Go or Visión.
Little of his later career – embracing pop art, hanging out with Andy Warhol, endorsing Datsun or Alka-Seltzer to make money – is visible. The impression is more of his talent than of his showmanship. Walking in the heat of the day up the steep hill behind Port Lligat to the town of Cadaqués, I thought of the contrast between his work and the productions of his supposed successors. At the time of the second world war, Dalí was producing pictures of undeniable quality. A painting such as “The Basket of Bread” shows the eye of a Dutch master: half a loaf in a flat basket rests on the edge of a wooden table against a dark background. The energy and precision make it seem like an extreme kind of reality. In its technical brilliance, it shows that the excesses of Dalí’s later work arose out of earlier accomplishments.
Current British artists such as Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst share his talent for publicity but lack his skill, though were he alive, Dalí’s would surely admire their ability to generate money.After half an hour of walking, desiccated now by the strength of the afternoon sun, I descended the slippery slate cobbles of the narrow streets of Cadaqués and reached the Catalan coast. Little boats rocked on the shining sea; children played in the water; artists tried to sell bad art in the square, perhaps hoping some echo of earlier visitors to the town such as Picasso or Man Ray might rub off on them.
I took a seat at a table outside the Bar Melitón. It was here, in this simple Costa Brava bar-cum-café, that Marcel Duchamp would play chess with his friend Dalí and local fishermen. In 1917, Duchamp had a bright idea. He signed a urinal with the name R. Mutt and declared that it was a work of art. It was an audacious piece of thinking and one that outraged and impressed his contemporaries. It was now for the artist to decide what was art: there was no objective standard. Once Duchamp had signed the urinal, he realised the idea or conceit had no further to go, and retired to Cadaqués to devote the rest of his days to playing chess. Everything that followed – Hirst’s shark, Emin’s bed – would be a repeat of Duchamp’s joke. Helped by a jug of sangria, I decided that Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp playing chess at the Bar Melitón represented the furthest point reached by conceptual art.
Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul will be published by Picador in March. He is also author of ‘Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land’
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Hello Dalí
To get to the Catalan coast from the UK, you can fly with Ryanair from Stansted to Girona, which is an hour’s drive from Figueres. This is where Salvador Dalí was born and is home to the Teatre-Museu Dalí (Plaça Gala-Salvador Dalí, 5, E-17600 Figueres; tel: + 34 972 677 500; open 9.00-20.00; entry €10, €7 concessions). This strange creation, built on the site of an old theatre, houses a diverse collection of Dalí’s art, including “Galarina” and “Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon”. In the basement, the man himself is buried in a crypt.
Further south, near Girona, is a medieval castle in Púbol known as the Castell Gala Dalí (Plaça Gala Dalí, E-17120 Púbol-la-Pera; tel: + 34 972 488 655; open 10.00-18.00; entry €6, €4 concessions). The artist’s wife lived here in her later years and it contains some of his drawings, paintings and elephant sculptures. Cadaqués lies on the Costa Brava. It is a beautiful port about an hour’s drive to the north-east of Figueres and is within walking distance of Dali’s museum-house in the village of Port Lligat.
As well as the famous Bar Melitón, Cadaqués has many excellent restaurants and cafés serving local specialities. The best restaurants in the town are S’Entína and Celeste, both within a few minutes’ walk of the square, overlooking the sea. An exhibition of photos of Dalí by his friend Robert Descharnes is on at the Museu de Cadaqués until January 6 2008.Tate Modern’s well-received summer exhibition on Dalí runs until September 9 in London (tel: +44 (0)20-7887 8888; open Sun-Thur 10.00-18.00; Fri and Sat 10.00-22.00; www.tate.org.uk (http://www.tate.org.uk/)) Copyright (http://www.ft.com/servicestools/help/copyright) The Financial Times Limited 2007
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The legacy of a surrealist showman
By Patrick FrenchPublished: August 4 2007 01:24 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:24
The Spanish make a lot of Salvador Dalí and he left a lot for them to make a fuss about. What other artist has left so many fascinating, absurd photographs of himself for posterity? All along the wild, craggy Catalan coast, in the town squares and the village bars, you can see pictures and posters of the moustachioed surrealist: Dalí communing with a live octopus, Dalí sitting in state wearing a crown, a goggle-eyed Dalí with his moustache tips pointing towards heaven, Dalí and his wife Gala looking respectable.
For most of his life, Dalí lived in a splendid, bizarre house of his and Gala’s creation, overlooking the harbour in Port Lligat, a little fishing village near Cadaqués in north-east Spain, near the French border. When he died in 1989, it was preserved with reverence by a foundation, and turned into a museum. This is not any old museum. You have to book a visit by telephone, turn up 30 minutes before your appointed tour time and endure being shuffled through the labyrinth of rooms at speed by unsympathetic guides. Dalí and Gala, a notably creepy and grasping couple, are sanitised: a round echo chamber lined with banquettes where male guests would have sex while Dalí watched from an external alcove, is described as a “dressing-room”. Really?, I asked the bored attendant with the name-badge and the walkie-talkie. “It is Gala’s dressing-room. Only for Gala.”
Lying on the banquettes, having seen a lot, were some little stuffed toys: a rhino, a lion, a lamb, a deer and a startled squirrel.Although wacky homes are now less rare than they would have been in the 1930s, you still feel a sense of shock at Dalí’s style and imagination when you enter the house at Port Lligat. The surrounding landscape is conventionally stunning – a cobalt blue bay, rustling pine trees, steep hillsides hacked by wind. The house itself is full of surprises. A stuffed polar bear greets you in the hall beside a crossbow, an old wind-up telephone and a sofa shaped like Mae West’s lips. In neighbouring rooms, smart traditional furniture is juxtaposed with unexpected sights such as a rhino’s head, stuffed swans on top of a bookcase, sprouting ram’s horns and a dried, deadly puffer-fish baring its fangs on a ledge. The legs of a stool turn out to be the delicate legs of a real deer. Teddy bears and quaint toys appear all over the house. Matchbox-sized bamboo cages hang, each one once home to a cicada – Dalí liked the noise of the captured insects. A ceiling is taken over by a huge, exquisite, splayed Japanese umbrella.
The studio at the heart of the house gives the strongest impression of something more than play. It is Dalí’s place of work, where his ideas unfurled. A picture window reveals the splendour of the bay and lets in natural light and the Tramontana, the savage local wind; a pair of spectacles with variegated lenses lie on an easel near an ecclesiastical bench; a pulley system lowers the finished canvases through the floor.Down a few steps you see a mirror positioned carefully to reflect the mannequins or the real models, who stood in an adjacent room.So much of Dalí’s painting abruptly becomes clear here: the religious iconography is taken from the Spanish Catholicism that surrounded him, the sexual imagery comes from his own voyeuristic obsessions, the surreal shapes in his pictures precisely match the rough, hollowed rocks of the Catalan coast. Another mirror is positioned on the far side of a different room to be visible from Dalí’s bed, so that he, and only he, could see the sunrise.
Above the house, on a hillside of olive trees, lies a trail of rubbish that you realise with a jump is an artistic rendition of a broken human body, or skeleton, the remains of a boat making the ribcage. The aerial view you expect of Dalí’s phallic swimming pool is not available on this guided tour. Instead, passing a pair of giant white coffee cups, you approach it at ground level, making it seem like nothing more than a long, thin place to swim. The swollen right testicle becomes a circular, azure pool edged in herringbone brickwork. At the head of the pool – guarded by huge, disturbing, stuffed cloth snakes – stands a glass rocket and a pair of thrones draped in white fabric.As the busy guides whisk you through the house, you have glimpses of the Dalís’ normal or abnormal life: Johnson’s Baby Powder on a ledge in the high-ceilinged bathroom, a connecting room wallpapered with photographs and cuttings of Dalí being Dalí on the cover of Time, Go or Visión.
Little of his later career – embracing pop art, hanging out with Andy Warhol, endorsing Datsun or Alka-Seltzer to make money – is visible. The impression is more of his talent than of his showmanship. Walking in the heat of the day up the steep hill behind Port Lligat to the town of Cadaqués, I thought of the contrast between his work and the productions of his supposed successors. At the time of the second world war, Dalí was producing pictures of undeniable quality. A painting such as “The Basket of Bread” shows the eye of a Dutch master: half a loaf in a flat basket rests on the edge of a wooden table against a dark background. The energy and precision make it seem like an extreme kind of reality. In its technical brilliance, it shows that the excesses of Dalí’s later work arose out of earlier accomplishments.
Current British artists such as Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst share his talent for publicity but lack his skill, though were he alive, Dalí’s would surely admire their ability to generate money.After half an hour of walking, desiccated now by the strength of the afternoon sun, I descended the slippery slate cobbles of the narrow streets of Cadaqués and reached the Catalan coast. Little boats rocked on the shining sea; children played in the water; artists tried to sell bad art in the square, perhaps hoping some echo of earlier visitors to the town such as Picasso or Man Ray might rub off on them.
I took a seat at a table outside the Bar Melitón. It was here, in this simple Costa Brava bar-cum-café, that Marcel Duchamp would play chess with his friend Dalí and local fishermen. In 1917, Duchamp had a bright idea. He signed a urinal with the name R. Mutt and declared that it was a work of art. It was an audacious piece of thinking and one that outraged and impressed his contemporaries. It was now for the artist to decide what was art: there was no objective standard. Once Duchamp had signed the urinal, he realised the idea or conceit had no further to go, and retired to Cadaqués to devote the rest of his days to playing chess. Everything that followed – Hirst’s shark, Emin’s bed – would be a repeat of Duchamp’s joke. Helped by a jug of sangria, I decided that Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp playing chess at the Bar Melitón represented the furthest point reached by conceptual art.
Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul will be published by Picador in March. He is also author of ‘Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land’
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Hello Dalí
To get to the Catalan coast from the UK, you can fly with Ryanair from Stansted to Girona, which is an hour’s drive from Figueres. This is where Salvador Dalí was born and is home to the Teatre-Museu Dalí (Plaça Gala-Salvador Dalí, 5, E-17600 Figueres; tel: + 34 972 677 500; open 9.00-20.00; entry €10, €7 concessions). This strange creation, built on the site of an old theatre, houses a diverse collection of Dalí’s art, including “Galarina” and “Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon”. In the basement, the man himself is buried in a crypt.
Further south, near Girona, is a medieval castle in Púbol known as the Castell Gala Dalí (Plaça Gala Dalí, E-17120 Púbol-la-Pera; tel: + 34 972 488 655; open 10.00-18.00; entry €6, €4 concessions). The artist’s wife lived here in her later years and it contains some of his drawings, paintings and elephant sculptures. Cadaqués lies on the Costa Brava. It is a beautiful port about an hour’s drive to the north-east of Figueres and is within walking distance of Dali’s museum-house in the village of Port Lligat.
As well as the famous Bar Melitón, Cadaqués has many excellent restaurants and cafés serving local specialities. The best restaurants in the town are S’Entína and Celeste, both within a few minutes’ walk of the square, overlooking the sea. An exhibition of photos of Dalí by his friend Robert Descharnes is on at the Museu de Cadaqués until January 6 2008.Tate Modern’s well-received summer exhibition on Dalí runs until September 9 in London (tel: +44 (0)20-7887 8888; open Sun-Thur 10.00-18.00; Fri and Sat 10.00-22.00; www.tate.org.uk (http://www.tate.org.uk/)) Copyright (http://www.ft.com/servicestools/help/copyright) The Financial Times Limited 2007