Dalí’s Empordà: Exploring the Landscape

The Dalí family began to spend summers in Cadaqués in 1908. Pepito Pichot, a good friend of Dalí’s father, inspired him to return to Cadaqués (Dalí Sr. was originally from Cadaqués) after his own family successfully established a home there that could accommodate their large family. After many visits to the Pichots at their home in Es Sortell, Dalí’s father caved and and admitted to wanting to rent or own property there (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 35). Upon hearing this, Pepito arranged for the Dalís to rent a converted stable from his sister, Maria, on Es Llané beach. Pictured on the left.

His infatuation with Gala, however, was not the final strike that concluded his time in Cadaqués. The second reason involves an exhibition at the Goeman’s Gallery in Paris November 20th 1929. Of the works exhibited, a drawing titled The Sacred Heart, 1929 was displayed which featured the following sentence: “Sometimes I spit for PLEASURE on the portrait of my mother.” His mother, Felipa Domènech passed from Uterine Cancer Feb. 6, 1921, and he describes her death in The Secret Life as “the greatest blow I had experienced in my life” (p.152). His family considered this an insult to his mother’s memory, and as a result, he was immediately exiled from Figueres. He was not, at this point, also exiled from Cadaqués, and he was sent there to reflect on his actions. This changed when a few days later, Dalí received a letter alerting him that he was no longer welcome at their summer home. From then onward, his father made it incredibly difficult for him to stay for any period of time in Cadaqués even if he was just passing through.

During their summer vacations, the Dalí family did not stay solely in Cadaqués. The family also had a tendency to make boat trips to Cape Creus, taken there by the family’s boatman, Enriquet. Declared a national reserve in 1998, Cape Creus is a peninsula located at the easternmost point of Spain, south of the French border. Coupled with sea erosion, the Tramuntana, a romanticized wind native to Catalonia, is the main cause responsible for shaping the landscape of Cape Creus. Blowing strongly at 80 mph, the Tramuntana is known to throw cars into the nearby sea, and force anyone who is willing to risk the wind to carry bricks in their pockets to weigh themselves down.

“The most beautiful spot of the Mediterranean lies just between Cape Creus and the Tudela Eagle (Àliga de Tudela).” Diary of a Genius, p.87

These optical illusions greatly impacted his work further down the line, but he did not make the connection of optical illusions to double images on his own. Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting (1632), and what he gleaned from it, is what solidified the connection. In the Treatise, da Vinci argued that landscapes, people, or fantastical scenes even, could be found in ordinary objects. He did not explicitly state that he was describing optical illusions, but Dali nevertheless made that connection. In his many writings, Dali does recount times where he was looking at one thing and saw another as da Vinci argues can be done. Da Vinci’s Treatise, and his memories, combined with the optical illusions of Cape Creus gave birth to Dali’s signature “Paranoiac-Critical Method”, a term he used to describe his double-image paintings where one image hides a second image.

He describes this process of observing and finding double-images in his 7^th Secret from his 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (p.61): “You must therefore know, young painter, that the Seventh Secret of your art resides in the sympathies and antipathies of your retina, in the manner in which you daily nourish it. For this you must surround it, as habitually as possible, with a propitious environment, with favorable retinal company, capable of serving as, of performing the office of, a kind of continual mosaic, persisting invisibly in the depth of your retina against which you will see real, full figures stand out more sharply.”

Of the number of identifiable rock formations at Cape Creus, the Head of Culleró was the rock more often than not referenced in Dalí’s work

With financial assistance from his wealthy patrons, the Noailles, the first hut was purchased in 1930. This original hut was one small (236 sq. ft.) room and had no electricity. If they wanted water they had to pump it from a nearby well (Dalí, The Empordà Triangle 102).“None of the palaces of Louis II of Bavaria aroused in his heart the yearning that this little cottage inflamed in Gala’s heart and mine” (Dalí, The Empordà Triangle p.166). Not too long after, a second hut was purchased and officially fitted to the existing home in 1932. From then on over forty years, the Dalís continued to gradually expand their home by purchasing nearby cottages and affixing them to the original hut. Once attached, the Dalís would then transform the new additions into whatever they required. The final product of this endeavor is pictured to the left. A loose timeline of when huts were acquired follows below.

• 1930 – First shack purchased
• 1932 – Second shack purchased
• 1935 – Started to purchase nearby properties to append to the existing structure.
• March 1936 – With help from generous patrons Edward James and Lord Berners, Dalí received 10,000 francs to put towards what would’ve been another shack that would’ve been added to the existing house. This ended up not going to plan and instead, the Dalí’s hired Emilio Puignau, a Port Lligat local, to add a new storey to one of the existing buildings (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí p.352-53).

Additionally hired to help maintain the property was Arturo Caminada, a fourteen year old Cadaqués local who was hired specifically to look after the Garden and the boat. Caminada remained with the Dalí’s for thirty seven years and never once outsold the Dalís. After they had both passed, the newly established Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation hired him to continue to look after the properties, which was a short-lived arrangement as Caminada died less than two years after Dalí in 1990 of what the locals claimed was a broken heart.

Bear Hall
Named for the large, looming taxidermy bear, Bear Hall is the first room in the house. A gift from one of Dalí’s famous collectors, Edward James, It originally arrived dyed purple, much to Dalí’s delight, and when the purple faded due to sun exposure, Dalí pledged to dye it green, which he never followed through on (The Wonderful World of Salvador Dalí, p.125). The stuffed bear was not just a conversation piece however, and did have multiple purposes, once serving as an umbrella stand, letter holder, harquebusier and as a lamp (Dalí, The Empordà Triangle, p.100). The bear, while multifunctional, also sent a very clear message to their guests, reminding them not to overstay their welcome. As kind as the Dalís were to their visitors, they were incredibly protective of their privacy and never allowed any of their guests to stay overnight.

Taxidermy and Preservation
Bear hall was not the only room in the house with a large, looming taxidermy animal. The Dalís Library featured stuffed swans, located on top of the bookcase. During their lifetime, they swam in the Bay of Port Lligat and Dalí was very fond of them. He once explained of his house “Here in this house, everything is preserved” (Dalí The Empordà Triangle, 100). Not only did the home preserve animals, but plants as well. Gala’s favorite flower was the Houseleek, seen here in the Library, and she decorated their home with large, dried bundles of them.

Dalí’s Studio
Of the many rooms that composed the Port Lligat labyrinth, the studio was where Dalí could be found more often than not. Prior to 1950, he used other rooms of the house, but once the studio was completed he used it definitively. Dalí took his work very seriously, starting at dawn and not finishing until the sun had set, only taking short breaks to swim, eat and have an afternoon nap (Dalí, The Empordà Triangle, 101). A strange feature of their home that is noticeable in this photograph is the absence of doors. Due to the lack of privacy, Dali can be seen diligently working in the entryway to his studio.

Barracks
Although never converted or assigned a purpose during Dalí’s lifetime, the barracks was also a notable purchase, and he bought it to keep it in its original state. This building is the subject matter of his 1954 painting Noon (Barracks at Port Lligat). This hut with the dry stonewall façade still intact, and the only building not drastically altered, currently houses the cloakroom of the House-Museum.

After Gala passed in 1982, Dalí returned briefly to Port Lligat, but left suddenly to live at Gala’s castle in Púbol where he lived for the next two years. He never returned to Port Lligat after that, and after an accident at the castle, lived the last five years of his life at his Theatre-Museum, now known as the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation. He did not return to Cadaqués either. His sister, Anna Maria, did indeed inherit their summer home and held a private mass for him there after his death.

A lighter, more fitting note to conclude with would be with one of the final quotes from Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí: “…to the landscape of the Upper Empordà that Dalí always admired fanatically from childhood and with which he will always be associated: Cadaqués, Port Lligat and the mineral wilderness of Cape Creus, that weird theatre of optical illusions which taught him that something can be something else, and where, one springtime day in 1925 he, Anna Maria and Lorca had munched their sandwiches beneath The Eagle.”