CADAQUES. The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has opened a new space that visitors can see when they go to Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat (Cadaqués), which is situated in the zone of Olivareda. It is a circular construction that the artist used as an additional workshop, a special room to make sculptures and performances. The crystal skylight allowed Dalí to paint feet, just like the ones on view at the Palacio del Viento (Sala Noble in the Figueres Theatre-Museum).
In the exterior part of the tower the artist put some ceramic containers with holes so that they would sound when the wind blew. In the interior one can see a piano that Dalí had used during some of his performances and two screens have been placed to show audiovisual material about the painters which were made during the 60s and 70s having the artista and the house as the protagonists.
According to the master of Surrealism, "Portlligat is a place for accomplishments. It is the perfect place for my work. Everything comes together: time passes slowly and every hour has its right dimension. There is a geologic tranquility: it is a unique planetary case.
The Portlligat Museum-House was Salvador Dalí’s only fixed abode, the place in which he usually lived and worked up till 1982 when, upon Gala’s death, he took up residence at Púbol Castle.
Salvador Dalí moved to Portlligat in 1930, into a small fisherman’s hut, attracted by the landscape, the light and the isolation of the place. Taking that initial construction as a basis, he created his house little by little over the course of forty years. He himself described it “like a true biological structure [...]. Each new pulse in our life has its own new cell, a room”.
The resulting form is the present labyrinthine structure which, from one point of departure, the Bear Lobby, spreads out and winds around in a succession of zones linked by narrow corridors, slight changes of level and blind passageways. Packed out with a multitude of objects and mementoes of Dalí, these zones are decorated with features that make them particularly warm: carpets, whitewash, dried flowers, velvet upholstery, antique furniture, stuffed animals, etc. Furthermore, all the rooms have windows of different shapes and proportions framing the same landscape that is a constant point of reference in Dalí’s work: the Portlligat bay.
Three different areas can be distinguished in the house: the part where the couple’s more private life was lived, on the ground floor and rooms 7 to 12; the studio, rooms 5 and 6, with numerous objects related with artistic activity; and the outside areas, room 13 and courtyards 14 and 15, designed to live a public life.
