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In 1976, Salvador Dalí painted a two-and-a-half-metre-high portrait of his wife and muse, Gala, nude, gazing out at the Mediterranean sea. Squint slightly and step back twenty metres, and a hazy portrait of Abraham Lincoln snaps into view, just to the left of Gala’s bare ankles; it demonstrates the artist’s fascination with our perception and twisting it. And it’s only when taking a step back from visiting Dalí’s home, flicking through your camera roll of photographs, that the true extent of the artist’s mischievousness reveals itself. In one photograph, a faceless mannequin peers out from a shadow-cast stairwell. Is this the ghost of Gala, haunting the home that was as much hers as his? Or just another Dalí-coded misdirection?
The home, a few hours northeast of Barcelona in the isolated fishing village of Port Lligat, has been immaculately preserved, as though in aspic; its creative energy bound on one side by the strange, blank landscapes of the low-lying Catalanides range and on the other by the strange, blank Mediterranean sea. The Port Lligat bay beach pushes persistently up to the front door, and indeed, reaches inside the Dalí mind, recurring in his work with tidal regularity. Even the white sea swans, wandering the beach looking for molluscs, pecked their way in: Dalí stuffed them when they died and kept them on display. A taxidermied lamentation lives forever in his salon.
Port Lligat was his preferred place to work. In his autobiography La Vida Secreta de Salvador Dalí (which he wrote when he was just 37) he describes it as ‘a unique planetary case’, one of ‘geographical peacefulness’. Today, the home is suspended in time as well as geography. Inside, it is 1984. Gala has recently died, and the artist has finally moved out to live in Púbol castle (about an hour away, where his wife famously spent every summer in her later years, with Dalí agreeing not to visit there without getting advance permission from her in writing). His main residence was the Port Lligat home until his death, and he left it packed with objects and memories: velvet upholstery, candles, woven carpets, half-formed paintings, floral green May West lips, dried flowers, antique furniture, slippers.
The house opens seasonally as a museum, and its tricks and treats are entirely the work of its most famous residents, who built the home and pretty much everything in it. On the way in, a giant taxidermy polar bear brandishes its claws at you disconcertingly. A local tour guide explains that it was fashionable at the time, and that Salvador and Gala had ‘curated each room, as much as living in them, with the total knowledge that one day the home would be open to visitors’. Keen as they apparently were on the idea of turning their beloved home into an open house, the marital duo built false floors and fancies in the fabric of the building, ready to trip you up (or threaten to rip you apart) at every turn.
Dalí’s influence on Escher can be felt in the architectural construction, which is vertiginous. Staircases of varying lengths zigzag illogically, some lead nowhere, and guests are never on the same level for more than a moment. If it wasn’t for the large picture windows filled to bursting with views of the Mediterranean, it would be easy to lose track of whether you were above ground or below it. The artist revelled in the genius of other designers of impossible constructions such as Paco Rabanne. The deep friendship between the two Spaniards recently inspired the latter’s namesake fashion house to launch a new collection, within which this house’s dizzying imprint is much in evidence.
It’s almost impossible to grasp how painfully ordinary the structure once was: a tumbledown cabin with a broken roof, used for storing fishing gear. To buy it, Dalí used the 20,000 French francs (about £17,000 in today’s money) given to him by the Viscount of Noailles as an advance on a painting that was to end up as The Old Age of William Tell (1931, the same year he made the first soft clocks).
The shack served the young Surrealist just fine. ‘I wanted it all good and small – the smaller the more womb-like,’ he wrote in his autobiography. A similarly ramshackle hut next door was bolted on a few months later, followed by a third in 1948, both of which contributed to the footprint, but also to the maddeningly complex floor plan. Various additional fishing dwellings were annexed over the lifespan of the growing home (in line with Dalí’s growing fame and Gala’s acute commercial instinct); and today, the impressive property sprawls over the rocks overlooking the bay and up into the olive groves beyond, while keeping the cocooning feel that the artist wanted, thanks to its thick, amniotic, white-washed walls.
The house wasn’t habitable until 1949, after Gala apparently took charge of decorating it, as the local tour guide explains. Many of the pieces that furnish it are second-hand, and thought to be sourced from dealers in the Spanish towns of La Bisbal d’Empordà and Olot. But little is known about this. It would be romantic to think of the home retrospectively as a collaborative effort across a shared and complex marital lifetime; in the same way Dalí would sometimes sign his paintings ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’. But it is more than possible.
A 2018 exhibition at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya positioned Gala as both muse and artist, as well as a key, under-appreciated figure in 20th-century creativity. She is popularly known as her husband’s manager and a driver of his commercialism, but her role as artistic force is disputed – she is sometimes vilified, and more often ignored. If it could be proved that Gala’s creative imprint was important to the interior design and decoration of the Port Lligat address, could it go some way in redressing the imbalance?
Whether it’s Dalí’s doing, or Gala’s (or both), this is a house that teases you on purpose; dancing in the dark of your own shadowy bedroom, long after you’re home safe and asleep. The performance poet John Cooper Clarke once said of the Surrealist that ‘dreams are not indistinct and misty and floaty, they happen in the middle of the afternoon, crystal clear. There aren’t any shadows. Dreams don’t have a subtext. The most unusual stuff happens in the most unusual way. You don’t question it, you deal with it when you find it. I think that’s why Dalí was absolutely right to be as hyperreal as he is.’ In his autobiography, the artist writes: ‘I do not yet have faith, and I fear I will die without heaven.’ Let’s hope he eventually found it on the shores of Port Lligat.
Entrance by reservation only. For opening times, visit salvador-dali.org
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