«I have built myself on these gravels; here I have created my personality, discovered my love, painted my work, built my house. I am inseparable from this sky, from this sea, from these rocks, linked forever to Portligat, where I have defined all my raw truths and roots”. In 1930, Salvador DaliHe arrived at Portlligat with 20.00 francs in his pocket and sealed his fate to that of a dilapidated shack that was used to store fishing tackle.
On that stone, he told himself, he would build his only stable house. And his workshop. And also his relationship with Gala. All at the same time everywhere. «Our little house was to consist of a room of about four square meters, which was to serve as a dining room, bedroom, workshop and hall. You went up a few steps and, on a landing, opened three doors leading to a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen barely big enough to move around in. I wished it was very small. The smaller, the more intrauterine », Dalí said in his autobiography.
Ninety-three years later, that ‘little house’ is a capital piece of the Dalinian triangle of Figueres-Cadaqués-Púbol. An imposing house-museum that opened to the public in 1997 and celebrates the 25th anniversary of its museumization with a photographic exhibition and a balance of 2.8 million visitors. The annual average is 115,000 visits per year, so the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, in charge of managing the space, hopes to reach 3 million people in the 2024-2025 season.
Half home, half workshop and with spaces as amazing as that circular room with astonishing acoustics, the phallic-shaped pool or a library with more than 4,300 volumes, Dalí’s surrealist house is now reunited with its history based on twenty reproductions photographs of Gala and Salvador Dalí in outdoor spaces in Portlligat.
These are photographs by Batlles-Compte, Melitó Casals “Meli”, Juan Gyenes, Oriol Maspons, Pietro Pascuttini, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Ricardo Sans and Robert Whitaker that show “an inhabited house, sometimes a stage design, and above all a workshop, the sancta sanctorum of the artist«. From there came, without going any further, legendary canvases such as ‘The hallucinogenic bullfighter’ (1970), ‘Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz’ (1951) or ‘La última cena’ (1955).
After being expelled from the family nucleus, the young Salvador Dalí decides not to stray from the light of Cadaqués and looks for a place in Portlligat to start with Gala. The Noguer family’s fishermen’s shack, with its successive extensions and remodeling, will be his home for fifty years.
A refuge and sanctuary by the sea, the 22-square-meter fisherman’s shack grew with successive extensions until it became the current 522-square-meter house. A space designed in the image and likeness of its owners in which stuffed animals, painting materials, the sofa inspired by the lips of Mae West, eggs and ovoid-shaped objects, Pirelli advertising posters or the complex mechanism that allows him to paint large canvases sitting in his armchair while Gala whispered selected readings to him. In the exhibition, which can be visited until September 30, Dalí can be seen posing on the terrace, painting in the olive grove and in the studio or allowing himself to be photographed by Oriol Maspons along with the models.
«We talked about being alone, about the magical prospect of going to Cadaqués to be alone, to see what was going to happen between the two of us. We went there to build walls under the sun to protect us from the wind, wells to capture springs, stone benches to sit on. We were going to build the first steps of the critical-paranoid method; We were going to continue that tragic and beautiful work of living together, of living for the reality of just the two of us», Dalí himself summed up in ‘The Secret Life’.