Cadaqués (Girona) (EFE)
The authors of the nineteen photographic reproductions of the painter in Portlligat that were taken between 1931 and 1980 are Batlles-Compte, Melitó Casals, Meli; Juan Gyenes, Oriol Maspons, Pietro Pascuttini, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Ricardo Sand and Robert Whitaker.
The house, the only stable workshop of Salvador Dalí, who was there for 52 years, although with intermissions abroad, is immersed in the landscape of Cadaqués and served as a place of inspiration and creation after Salvador Dalí and Gala initially moved to live in that space to a 22-square-meter shack that grew to the current building of 522 square meters.
The director of the Dalí Museums, Montse Aguer, has pointed out that they have a collection of more than 16,000 photographs that this exhibition has allowed, which ends its tour with a few words from Gala, which she also considers to be a main part of Portlligat.
About the house, to which Dalí moved after the episode of breakup with his father when he titled one of his paintings “Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure”, he explained that the artist exhibited little in it, but he has remembered for the events he organized, the ‘happenings’, meetings around music and provocative proposals.
The atmosphere of Portlligat in the life of the artist
The president of the Gala-Dalí Foundation, Jordi Mercader, has presented “Dalí and Gala. The inhabited house”: the photo exhibition begins in the bay in front of the façade of this building and ends in the olive grove, where the surrealist genius had his garage.
The exhibition, conceived by the director of the Dalí Museums, Montse Aguer, together with the head of documentation for the foundation, Rosa Maria Maurell, and a member of the Center for Dalinian Studies, Maria Carreras, wishes to bear witness to the atmosphere of Portlligat during the life of the artist and his wife Gala.
In the presentation, Mercador reviewed the evolution of this space since the Ministry of Culture ceded it to the Gala-Dalí Foundation in 1993.
Until last year, close to 2.8 million visitors had passed through a house in which 2.3 million euros have been invested for rehabilitation and maintenance and which has reversed 23 million euros in the form of box office revenue, about Figures that Mercader has described as “unthinkable” success when the project started.
Thousands of objects to better understand the figure of Dalí
Of the collection that the museum contains, it has been detailed that there are some 3,000 varied objects that allow us to better understand the figure of Dalí and his working technique; among them, some are the artist’s creation and others are tools that he used to paint, furniture or clothing, although there is also his personal library.
In this regard, the president of the Gala-Dalí Foundation has vindicated the “mysticism” that the painter transferred to that minimal initial construction, which he arrived at “at the age of twenty-six without water or electricity.”
Each photograph is accompanied by a QR code that gives access to audio about the unique universe of Portlligat in four languages: Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The exhibition can be seen from March 15 to September 30.