An Eccentric’s Spain

Head north from Barcelona, past the beaches and rolling foothills of Catalonia, and look for this drab little city about 15 miles south of the French border. Head up the main drag. Then turn right at the big red building, the one with the 6-foot-high eggs balanced on its roof and the loaves of faux bread plastered to its sides in a sort of lunatic wallpaper pattern. These are clues.

Pause at the plaza where the tractor tires and television sets stand artfully stacked. Then hand over your pesetas and step into the old theater building with the geodesic dome on top, the melting clocks in the gift-shop window and the irrigated Cadillac in the courtyard. Now you stand at the entrance of the Teatre-Museu Dali, ground zero in the wacky world of surrealist Salvador Dali.

In the period since the Dali museum opened 25 years ago (the artist died 10 years ago, at age 84), biographers have laid bare Dali’s unscrupulous moneymaking practices, and his reputation among critics has “flat-lined,” in the words of this newspaper’s chief art critic, Christopher Knight. But look at this crowd--these backpackers hunched by the wall, those pensioners who just pulled up in the tour bus, those eager masses at the ticket counter and the gift shop cash register.

The tide of visitors to the Dali museum is stronger than ever. And for an increasing number of them, this is but one stop on a larger Dali itinerary. In 1996, Dali’s wife’s country castle in Pubol opened to visitors. Then in 1997, the artist’s seaside home in Port Lligat was opened. Together with the Figueres museum, they make up a Dali tourism triangle, set amid the rocky coastline and Pyrenees foothills of northeast Spain’s Catalonia region.

None of these sites can offer the painting that won Dali his widest fame, “The Persistence of Memory.” That 1931 image of three melting watches is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But the Figueres museum displays about 1,000 Dali works (another 3,000 are in storage), and the home and castle hold a trove of personal effects, from the stuffed polar bear in the home to the garden statuary at the castle. After a few days on the Dali trail, nobody is likely to complain of underexposure.

On a five-day ramble recently through Catalonia, I visited the museum, the home and the castle--all run by the nonprofit foundation Dali created in 1983--and a few other exhibits offered nearby by other organizations.

Even without Dali, Catalonia would be intriguing. The Catalans, a fiercely independent people who held on to their distinct language despite oppression from Madrid for most of this century, remain part of Spain but now run their territory as an autonomous community. Aside from a widely admired cuisine, Catalan culture has also produced a formidable set of modern artists, including Dali, architect Antonio Gaudi and painter Joan Miro.

Unless you’re an art scholar, the Dali sites aren’t extensive enough to make them the centerpiece of an entire trip. But they make a fine adventure when appended to a Barcelona city stay, or a respite on the beaches of Spain’s Costa Brava. In fact, even if his art leaves you cold, a journey around the Dali triangle outlines a singular 20th century life, beginning with an awkward teenager who loved his summers by the sea, affected a cane and cape to hide his shyness, slavishly devoted himself to the mastery of drawing and painting techniques, revered the works of Impressionists and Cubists, and hungered for fame.

“I’ll be a genius, and the world will admire me,” Dali wrote in his diary at age 16. “Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius, I’m certain of it.”

Soon after, the young Dali heads off to art school in Madrid, forms strong friendships with aspiring poet Federico Garcia Lorca and filmmaker-to-be Luis Bun~uel and starts waxing his mustache. In Paris, he meets the poet Paul Eluard, steals his Russian wife, Gala (who leaves her daughter behind), marries her and gives her a lifelong starring role in his paintings. By the time the Spanish Civil War erupts in 1936, Dali’s dreamlike surrealist imagery and ferocious self-promotion win him critical admiration and global celebrity.

At the other end of this story, more than 50 years later, waits a famous personality, now a weak and drug-numbed old man, stubborn yet bullied by his wife and by a gun-toting secretary, his wealth estimated at perhaps $130 million, yet still so money-hungry that he signs and sells blank sheets of paper by the tens of thousands.

Much of this information comes from Ian Gibson’s 1997 biography, “The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali,” which is for sale in gift shops at all three Dali sites. But at the sites themselves, the colors are bright and the Dali recalled is boyish and brilliant. This is the Dali of upturned mustache, impish eyes, regal bearing, provocative sound bites. For instance: “Beauty will be edible or not at all.”

Figueres is where the artist spent his youth, where his work was first exhibited and where he returned as a feeble widower for the last two years of his life. The museum, which Dali spent years assembling, has been the top attraction in town (population about 30,000) since its opening in 1974. The artist is buried in a crypt here, and the surrounding neighborhood is full of Dali-dependent gift shops and cafes. It’s an easy day trip from Barcelona by car or train, and if you have an hour extra, Figueres has a pleasant pedestrian promenade, or rambla, near the museum. I stayed the night before on the Costa Brava near San Feliu de Guixols, the night after on the coast again, at Cadaques.

I reached Figueres in September, shortly after the close of the peak July-August tourism season, but the crowds inside the museum were giddy and thick. The biggest congregation seemed to be in the Mae West Hall, where viewers wait in line to climb a ladder and peer through a lens. The view is of the room’s furnishings--red couch, furry trellis, a pair of fireplaces and a few other odd objects, which, translated in the lens from three dimensions to two, combine to form Mae West’s face. But I came on the wrong day. I waited a few minutes near a fireplace/nostril, advanced a negligible distance in the line and walked on.

Other rooms were less congested, including the one that houses another well-known optical trick: a 1976 painting that up close seems to be Gala posing by the sea, under a cloud, nude with her back turned. Stand back and the scene morphs into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

With art like this on the walls, a museum-goer can’t help but relax a little. There was plenty of laughter and chat in the galleries, and there were no awkward pauses for the reading of biographical information or historical context because, as Dali decreed, the museum offers virtually none.

In any event, they’re giving the public what it wants. The museum’s attendance has doubled since 1986, reaching 751,000 last year--a remarkable figure in an out-of-the-way town with few other attractions.

About an hour’s drive east of Figueres, at the end of a winding two-lane mountain road that’s best tackled in daylight, lie Cadaques and Port Lligat. Cadaques, where Dali’s father brought the family in summer, is a charming, whitewashed city on the sea. Port Lligat (yee-GOT) is a fishing village just north of Cadaques where, after a falling-out with his father, Dali built a quirky, rambling waterfront home. Gradually buying up adjacent land and adding to the compound, the artist resided part-time there for more than four decades.

The Port Lligat home accepts visitors by appointment from March through January--and runs on a strict schedule. Eight or nine visitors are admitted every 10 minutes, escorted through the house in four stages and bidden goodbye 40 minutes later. I was three minutes late for my appointment and got a chewing-out by the ticket-taker, who made me wait another 20 minutes before entering. But it was worthwhile. In fact, the home tour, which is narrated by well-briefed guides who speak English, French, Spanish and Catalan, helps explain the museum.

Dali bought the first portion of the house, a fisherman’s bungalow, in 1930. The entrance features a stuffed polar bear wearing turquoise jewelry, and there are bookcases everywhere--but for preservation purposes Dali’s original library has been removed and replaced with book-like objects of varying hues. The not-quite-reality of the faux books fits in perfectly with the rest of the house, which includes a round room reserved as Gala’s retreat and another room, full of dismembered mannequins and other odd props, that was a resting area for figure models.

One dressing area is filled floor to ceiling with celebrity photos: Dali with Ed Sullivan, with Laurence Olivier, with Harpo Marx. The artist designed a swimming pool outside to resemble either a penis or the floor plan of the Alhambra. (Dali’s answer depended on who was asking the question.)

The windows of the Port Lligat house open to broad ocean views, and an angled mirror in the master bedroom gave Dali a chance to watch the sunrise from his regal bed. In fact, as Dali pointed out to visitors, since that coastline is the easternmost corner of the country, he was the first man in Spain to see the sun rise each day.

The view from those windows is the rocky headland of Cape Creus--a territory Dali called “a grandiose geological delirium.” Hike awhile amid its glinting mica deposits and pools (the area is set aside as parkland), and the light-bathed landscapes of Dali’s work don’t seem so fantastic.

Or explore it by water in the artist’s old boat. Dali and Gala took frequent picnic trips out to the headland, usually in a launch piloted by their employee Arturo Caminada. In 1989, when the childless Dali died, Caminada found he’d been left out of the artist’s will despite decades of service. Caminada died the following year, but in 1998, after the Port Lligat home opened to visitors, Caminada’s son hit upon a way to exploit the family’s Dali connection.

And so these days, as you exit the Dali house and stroll past the boats tied up nearby, your eyes are likely to fall on a bold yellow vessel named Gala. The junior Caminada has restored the boat that his father, Dali and Gala used from 1955 to about 1974. Now he offers several excursions daily to the cape and back for $6 per person.

I ponied up $12 to persuade the boatman to take me alone. Roaring toward land’s end under a brilliant sun, we passed bathers in tiny inlets and upthrust rocks in countless Rorschach shapes. Abe Lincoln? Mae West? All was feasible.

Then I headed south to Cadaques (pronounced cada-CASE), where Dali spent most of his childhood summers. I landed at the Hotel Llane Petit, then learned that the Dali home had been in the neighborhood.

Dali was resented by many in town, or so I was told by Carlos Lozano, a longtime Dali friend who runs an art gallery there. But there’s a statue of him now on the busiest stretch of the waterfront. There is also the Centre d’Art Perrot Moore, which was started two decades ago by longtime Dali associate Peter Moore.

The collection, about 200 Dali paintings, drawings, lithographs and sculptures, is on the motley side, but intriguing. Consider, for instance, that the famously puritanical Walt Disney and the notorious libertine Dali in the early 1960s seriously considered collaborating on an animated version of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Here are Dali’s drawings from the abandoned project. Upstairs, the collection offers a few early nuggets, including sketches from Dali’sstudent days, a gouache landscape attributed to Dali at age 8, a photo of him with art school classmates and a 1922 seascape of the Cadaques waterfront. It’s not a lot, but it’s more explanatory than anything on the walls at the Figueres museum.

My last stop on the Dali triangle was Pubol, a tiny hilltop hamlet about an hour south of Figueres. With a break along the way to eat lunch and view the Greek and Roman ruins at Empuries on the coast, the journey from Cadaques to Pubol took me about four hours.

Here Dali pilgrims prowl the castle and grounds that the artist bought in 1970 and renovated for Gala. The castle dates to the 14th century, and the community that surrounds it amounts to little more than a restaurant and a few blocks of homes. But getting there makes a nice drive through the rolling countryside, and the city of La Bisbal, just a few miles south, is widely known for its terra cotta-and-green ceramics.

Dali’s most notable contributions to the Pubol castle are the so-called escutcheon room, with its ceiling fresco and trompe l’oeil door, and four long-legged elephant sculptures that lurk in the garden. At the far end of the garden lies a pool that reflects 14 busts of the composer Wagner. But my favorite castle feature was a trompe l’oeil Dali painting that depicts a radiator in assiduous detail and conceals . . . an identical radiator. (This was Dali’s joke on Gala, who abhorred the sight of radiators and was constantly looking for ways to conceal them.)

Pubol was Gala’s occasional retreat for much of the 1970s, Dali having pledged that he would never enter the castle without a written invitation. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dali moved into the castle for two years, suffered life-threatening burns in a bedroom fire, then decamped to Torre Galatea--the red building next to the museum in Figueres--for his remaining years.

Unless you’re held spellbound by the display of Gala’s party dresses on the top floor, the castle tour is probably a one-hour proposition. For many, it ends with the crypt below, where Gala lies alone, her grave marker neighbored by a matching blank stone.

But who wants to end a tour at a crypt? I suggest another turn in the garden, where those Wagners gaze upon the shallow pool, where the quartet of tall elephants rises in the greenery, where any newcomer is bound to wonder: What sort of mind would think of these things?

GUIDEBOOK

Hello Dali

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights from LAX to Barcelona, but American, Delta, TWA, Air France, British Airways and Lufthansa offer connecting flights. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $768.

Where to stay: In Barcelona, the Princesa Sofia Inter-Continental is an upscale modern hotel on a main thoroughfare; 4 Plaza Pio XII, telephone (800) 327-0200 or 011-34-93-330-7111, fax 011-34-93-330-7621, Internet https://www.interconti.com; doubles $170 on weekends, higher midweek. In Cadaques, the Hotel Llane Petit has a great location and rotten parking; 37 Doctor Bartomeus, tel. 011-34-972-258-050, fax 011-34-972-258-778; doubles $100 July-August, $80 in June, $70 in other months.

The Dali triangle: In Figueres: Teatre-Museu Dali, 5 Placa Gala-Salvador Dali, local tel. 972-511-800, e-mail t-mgrups@dali-estate.org; open January through June and October through December, 10:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; July through September, daily 9-7:45 p.m.; $6.

In Port Lligat: Salvador Dali House, tel. 972-258-063; by appointment Monday to Saturday 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. through Jan. 9, reopening March; $8.

In Pubol: Gala Dali Castle, tel. 972-488-211, March 13 to Nov. 1, 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; daily June 15 to Sept. 15; $4.

For more information: Tourist Office of Spain, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211; tel. (323) 658-7188, Internet https://www.okspain.org.