FIGUERES, SPAIN.-This year, to mark the centenary of Salvador Dali’s May 11 birth, thousands of visitors are expected to pay homage to the artist at his home in Port Lligat and the Dali Museum in Figueres during what is being called  Dalímania. One hundred years after his birth, Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989), the sexy old showman and surrealist, is being given the mother and father of a centenary celebration. The villages of the Costa Brava were first discovered in the early 1900s by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall, who were intrigued with the light and the rugged landscape. Salvador Dali was born on the Costa Brava and made his home there until his death in 1989, but Barcelona was the city where he battled it out with Picasso for the title of Greatest Living Spanish Artist and where he developed a passion for the work of another of his countrymen - Antoni Gaudí. The Salvador Dali museum in Figueres, the town where Dali was born in 1904, not only contains some of the artist’s most important works but is itself a wacky surrealist creation. Dali is buried in the museum’s crypt.
Known as the Theatre-Museum Dali because of the ruins of an 1849 theater incorporated into the structure, the museum opened in 1974 and quickly became one of the most visited sites in Spain. The pink domed facade has walls studded with triangular sets of gold knobs and topped by giant eggs and skinny statues with arms raised high. The entry opens onto a courtyard dominated by Rain Cadillac, a vintage black Cadillac with a busty lady statue standing on the hood and an interior filled with jungle greenery watered by a steadily dripping rainfall. The labyrinthine passages within the museum include a dizzying arrangement of galleries filled with paintings, sculptures and jewelry. They include many homages to Dali’s beloved wife and muse, Gala, and dozens of his works, including Amoeba Face, Mannequin-chair, Portrait of Picasso and a replica of the Venus de Milo With Drawers, a statue designed by Dali and executed by Marcel Duchamp. The Mae West Hall shows his double-image technique in The Face of Mae West That Can Be Used as a Drawing Room, which is viewed by walking up a small flight of stairs and looking through a lens.
In the nearby town of Port Lligat, just outside of Cadaques, is the home Dali created in 1930 with Gala. A modest cottage by the sea, the tile-roofed, white stucco home grew over many years to reflect all of the artist’s whimsy. Rooms include the Hall of the Bear, presided over by a giant polar bear adorned with necklaces, medals and a variety of walking sticks. At the window is a version of Dali’s famous sofa designed in the shape of a pair of lips. Despite oversized geese perched on the top shelf, the library has a cozy feel, and the studio has a window with a sea view that surely must have been an inspiration. The view is repeated in the bedroom, the uppermost room in the house, which is decorated in purple and red. Gala’s dressing room is papered with magazine covers featuring her husband and photos of the pair with luminaries from around the world. Even the swimming pool bears Dali’s inimitable trademark, presided over by a statue of the Michelin man and with a red plastic lips sofa set against a wall adorned with images of Pirelli tires.
The Dalí season is already underway in Barcelona, where the big blockbuster show that launches the centenary, Dalí and Mass Culture, is controversial but hugely popular and well worth a visit. It shows the artist largely in the second part of his career, when he spent time in America and turned himself into a vastly prolific one-man industry working in film, fashion, photography and advertising. This is the flamboyant Dalí on show - the Dalí who designed a perfume range in bottles modeled on his scrotum and a sofa to look like Mae West’s lips. This is the Dalí who stormed his way into the public consciousness with the lobster telephone, the gloves with fingernails, the shoe hat and the "rainy taxi" in which the rain falls on the inside. Here is Dalí’s work with the surrealist photographers Man Ray and Halsman with whom he created a series of pictures in which the artist appears in evening dress by the side of a huge skull – a form made up of the bodies of seven naked young women.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the resurrection of a fragment of Destino, a film Dalí started in Hollywood in 1946 as a collaboration with Walt Disney. Roy Disney and the 90-year-old original director, John Hench, completed the project after 54 years – and earlier this year their recreation picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. The piece, in which a dancer metamorphoses into the shadow of a bell and a dandelion puff, is set to the music of the Mexican ballad Destino. It is a dream-like collage of archetypal Dalí images – forced perspectives, classical ruins, eyeballs, insects and, once again, those signature melting watches. Hollywood could never really cope with Dalí – after all, his first film with Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, made back in 1929 (and on show in the exhibition) shocked and sickened audiences with an opening shot of the moon bisected by a long thin cloud that dissolves into a woman’s eye being sliced by a long thin razor. Only Hitchcock knew that Dalí’s brilliance, especially in creating the landscape of dreams could be put to cinematic use. Spellbound (also on show) was the first popular film to acknowledge psychoanalysis as way of understanding behavior. In it Gregory Peck is suffering from amnesia and Ingrid Bergman is trying to cure him by analyzing his dreams. It was Dalí who designed those dream sequences of eyes and scissors and flapping birds and gaming tables with all the vivid, crazy chop-logic of a real nightmare.
This month another exhibition celebrating the links between painter and architect opens at La Pedrera. But Dalí’s favorite place in Barcelona was the Güell Park, where Gaudí’s mosaics rise up in waves of color to make towers, caves and serpents. This is the hallucinogenic world of Wagnerian legend that Dalí and Gaudí loved. The Barcelona exhibition ends, appropriately enough, in a silver room full of cushions, which Dalí shares with another of his cultural heroes – Andy Warhol. Dalí made some screen tests for Warhol that are on show. The two became friends and it is as if the old showman is handing the baton to the young pop artist. Dalí, with his love of nickel-plated headlamps, Fox newsreels, Harpo Marx, mannequins, gramophones and black-bottom dancers, broke down the barriers between the great European tradition of "high" culture and industrially-manufactured popular or "low" culture. That is what Warhol did too. It’s why we are amused and delighted by them both and why a trip to Barcelona is in order right now.
The Kingdom of Bahrain contributed to the tributes being made to Salvador Dalí on the Jordan Ford EJ14 cars at the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend. Previous emblems displayed on Jordan’s cars in Bahrain’s campaign of messages: Australian Grand Prix Dove of Peace, Malaysian Grand Prix Racial Equality, Bahrain Grand Prix Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and San Marino Grand Prix Ayrton Senna tribute.
The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation was set-up by the artist himself in 1983 to protect the artistic, cultural and intellectual qualities of his work throughout Spain and the rest of the world. Salvador Dali was President of the foundation up until his death in 1989 and now the foundation is run by a board of trustees appointed by The Government of Spain and Catalonia. Princess Cristina of Spain has been a life-long trustee since 1998. The Foundation is based in Figueres near Barcelona, the town of Dalí’s birth.
Several cities in the United States are also paying homage to the brilliantly creative Spanish artist with exhibitions in Dallas such as "Worlds and Dreams of Salvador Dali," on view from May 23 to Aug. 15, at the Dallas Museum of Art which will also include
Dali’s fantastic and whimsical portfolio, "Imaginations and Objects of the Future," as the subject of this exhibit, along with a selection of his prints for Dante’s Divine Comedy. A gallery talk, "Beyond Reality: Salvador Dali," will take place at 12:15 p.m. June 2. Fort Worth is also holding their own celebration with the exhibition “Dali: 100 Years," on view from June 11-27, at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Dali art and collectibles from the Salvador Dali Gallery in Pacific Palisades, Calif., will be on exhibit and for sale.  "Caravaggio to Dali: 100 Masterpieces From the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art," will be on view from June 27 through Sept. 26, at the Kimbell Art Museum. Dali’s works, including Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish, will be among the selection of European paintings and sculptures on exhibit.
St. Petersburg, Florida’s Salvador Dali Museum is holding “Dali Centennial: An American Collection," through Sept. 6. Organized chronologically, the exhibit marks the various periods in the evolution of Dali’s artistic vision. On display are works from the museum’s collection and archives, plus works on loan from the Dali Foundation in Spain and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibit also features Dali’s sculptures, watercolors, jewelry, flatware and historical documents. Lectures and events are planned throughout the spring. Admission is $13 for adults; discounts available for seniors, students and children.
"Dali and Mass Culture" at Caixa Forum, until May 23 features more than 300 oil paintings, drawings, films and other objects that explore Dali’s combination of "high culture" and "low culture" and his use of modern objects such as telephones, cars and mass-consumption products. The show gives a wonderful account of Dalí’s pavilion designs for the New York World’s Fair of 1939. While other designers were hooked on chrome and streamlining for the coming age of the jet, Dalí and his wife, Gala, created the Dream of Venus, a fake coral pleasure palace that housed a pool in which live, topless mermaids cavorted and bobbled about with a man made of rubber ping-pong bats and a mummified cow. The traveling exhibit is currently showing in Barcelona, but it eventually will be displayed in Madrid, St. Petersburg and Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Other exhibits, such as "The Quixote According to Salvador Dali," "Private Memories: Salvador Dali’s Childhood and Youth" and "Dali’s Land" are being held in various Dali-related venues in Spain.
The son of a notary in the town of Figueres, Dali was a shy boy whose talent for art was encouraged by his parents and his younger sister, who sat for several of his early paintings. Leaving in 1921 for art school in Madrid, Dali conquered his timidity through exhibitionism and befriended intellectuals such as Bunuel and poet Federico Garcia Lorca. An admirer of Pablo Picasso, Dali recounts how he sought out his fellow Spanish artist in Paris in 1927. "I came to see you before going to the Louvre" said Dali. "You did the right thing" replied the Malagan artist bluntly. Unsurprisingly perhaps, their friendship faltered as Dali’s fame grew.
For many, the driving force behind Dali’s success was his eccentric wife Gala, a Russian émigré he met in 1929 and who became his lover, muse and business manager. Gala eased his entry into fashionable Paris society and worked tirelessly to promote his work.
"Dali was incapable of anything practical. Anything like booking airline tickets or selling paintings, Gala did all that," said Sentis. "Dali without Gala would not have achieved what he did. Afterwards she kept the money which was hers."
As his fame grew, Dali’s larger-than-life image became just as important as his art. When asked by an interviewer why he grew a moustache, Dali remarked ironically: "To pass unnoticed!” Dali’s work revels in making daily objects appear unreal, such as the melting watches of his 1931 masterpiece "The Persistence of Memory”. His paintings surprise the viewer as new objects emerge, as they change perspective, such as a hidden portrait of French philosopher Voltaire in his 1940 canvas "The Slave Market".
So great was Dali’s creative outburst that he produced more than 1,500 paintings and drawings alone during his lifetime.