Salvador Dali: Cadaqués and Portlligat (Port Lligat)
"One cannot understand my painting without knowing Portlligat" ~ Salvador Dali Dali spent his summers with family in Cadaques where his father rented first studio for young Salvador. Dali carried fond memories of that coast with him all his life: "One
It has been our dream for a long time to travel to Spain and explore Costa Brava (the Wild Coast). As the wife of an artist, I wondered why the mysterious Salvador Dali escaped from the world to his house/studio in Portlligat which, in his own words, "... is the place of production. It is the perfect place for my work, everything conspires so that it is thus: time passes more slowly and each hour has its exact dimension. There is a geological calm...
The secret life of Salvador Dali in Portlligat
It is like entering an outer shell of Dali's life and stumbling through the corridors of his mysterious mind.
"...we were going to continue that tragic and beautiful labor of living together, of living for the reality of just two of us". ~ Salvador Dali
The pain, loss, and confusion of a young boy who was named after his dead brother and who lost his mother to breast cancer at the age of sixteen always stayed with Dali, mixed with happy memories of tranquil summer days at Cadaques. You can see it in his paintings, writings, obsessions and fantasies.
Dali's father strongly disapproved of his surrealism affiliations on the Parisian art scene and his romance with Gala, a Russian immigrant 11 years older than Dali, and threw him out of the house in December of 1929. Dali's father told him never to set foot in Cadaques again...
The pain, loss, and confusion of a young boy who was named after his dead brother and who lost his mother to breast cancer at the age of sixteen always stayed with Dali, mixed with happy memories of tranquil summer days at Cadaques. You can see it in his paintings, writings, obsessions and fantasies.Dali's father strongly disapproved of his surrealism affiliations on the Parisian art scene and his romance with Gala, a Russian immigrant 11 years older than Dali, and threw him out of the house in December of 1929. Dali's father told him never to set foot in Cadaques again...
Salvador Dali & Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova
In 1929 two soul mates, two snails on the rocks of Cadaques, met on the beach to be together from now on and to form a peculiar partnership Gala-Dali, which puzzled their friends and family.
Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova - this name is relatively unknown, even to art connoisseurs, but the person behind the name is as famous as her husband, Salvador Dali. It's a mystery how 19 year-old Elena made her way from her native Kazan in Tatarstan, which was part of Russian Empire, to Switzerland for tuberculosis treatment in 1913. She was cured, fell in love
Salvador Dali
"a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being"?
As George Orwell wrote in his essay Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali: "The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism." It is not a flattering review of a surrealistic idol's life - Orwell goes into analyzing some pretty gross details which for me brings up a question: can you like some works of an artist, be appalled by others, and disagree and disapprove of certain behaviors? For the sake of this argument let's
