There are several museums in Madrid that together form an “Art Walk” with works by Dali figuring prominently.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, seen at the top in a Google Earth image, is home to many of his works.

Above is “The Basket of Bread”, from 1926, an astonishingly realistic depiction. The museum also has “The Great Masturbator” (1929), “Portrait of Luis Bunuel” (1924), “Cubist Self-Portrait” (1923) and, below, “Figure at a Window”, from 1925 sometimes referred to as “Girl Standing at the Window”.

This is, once again, Dali’s sister Ana-Maria, almost always the only female subject he could find in his youth. His favourite poses for her were from the back and by a window. An exception is “Portrait of Ana Maria (Cadaqués)”, from the same year, which the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundations owns.

“During the hours I served him as model I never tired of looking at the landscape, which already, and forever, formed a part of me,” she wrote in her 1949 memoir, “Dali as Seen by His Sister”.

“He always painted me near a window, and my eyes had time to take in all the smallest details.”

Some of the “small details” that Ana included in her book didn’t sit well with her big brother, who still hadn’t forgiven her for siding with their father and denouncing Gala in 1929. They had a row and he vowed never to see her again, a promise he kept until he was at death’s door.

And thus, from the tender and beautiful depiction of Ana in “Figure at a Window”, so proudly displayed in Dali’s first solo exhibition at Barcelona’s Dalmau Galleries, emerged 1954’s taunting, hurtful “Young Virgin Auto-Sodomised by the Horns of Her Own Chastity”, seen below.

Below, two more views of Ana from the rear when her brother still found the pose compelling. “Seated Girl, Seen from the Back” from 1925, which is also at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, and “Girl from the Back”, sometimes referred to as “Girl’s Back”, done a year later. It’s at the Dali Museum in Florida.

Dalí returned to the bakery in 1945 for another delectable work, also called “The Basket of Bread”, in which some commentators see more of the “rich symbolism attached to bread” and wax poetic about the doughy ornamentation at the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueras.

Dalí once commissioned the celebrated Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne to make him a bread frame for a painting, then several chairs and then a four-poster bed. “It was beautiful,” Poilâne recalled years later. The colour was so intense — a brown, woody shade. I made a spectacular bird cage for him with a real bird inside. The bird ate his way out and flew away. It was very poetic.”

Dalí’s reaction: “Poilâne, he is the living Frenchman that I prefer.”

The baker had his own artistic inventiveness, and hung bread chandeliers, complete with electrical fittings, in both of his stores. The original shop, founded by his father in 1932, remains at 8 Rue de la Cherche-Midi, though Lionel died with his wife when the helicopter he was piloting crashed off the coast of Brittany in 2002.

The official website of his shop, now run by his daughter, is here, and the Wikipedia entry on him here.

This is another stop on Madrid’s “Art Walk” of museums displaying works by Dali.

The Museo Thyssen Bornemisza — home since 1992 to the eclectic Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection — has “Pierrot with Guitar” (1923-24) and, shown here, “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate”, from 1944.

“Composition — Portrait of Mrs Eva Kolsman”, from 1946, is among the permanent collection at Palma de Mallorca’s Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, which also features treasures by Picasso, Miro and Gris.

Also on view here are “Portrait of the Artist’s Father and Sister”, which Dali claimed was his first pencil drawing, and the oil “Portrait of the Artist’s Father”, both done in 1925, and, at the bottom of this post, “Portrait of Jose M Torres”.

It’s noted on the museum’s website that Dali was six years and an ocean removed from Breton and his circle when he painted “Composition” during his long American sojourn, and yet still filled the canvas with surrealist notions. The vast expanse suggests the US Southwest rather than Catalonia, however, and the woman and her poodle are pure New York.

Tempting us into the picture like an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities are shells and strange rocks, eggs, a deer, two dogs, a rider on a horse and a crumbling stone archway suggesting the bones of a skeleton.

And then there is Eva Kolsman, duplicated not once by twice by some invisible, distorting carnival mirrors. As in “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus” nine years earlier, there is no truth in relections, so we have to create our own reality.

The museum offers no details about Eva Kolsman, other than saying she was a singer. There was a well-known film and arts patron in New York at the time named Eva Kollsman, but I haven’t been able to determine whether they are the same person. UPDATE: Karl Heinz Klumpner has kindly provided more information about Eva. See comment #1 below the post.

Born Julie Dorothea Baronin von Bodenhausen in 1902, this Eva was thrice married, the last time to Paul Kollsman of Long Island, a German-born engineer who invented the barometric altimeter now standard in aircraft, as tested on a 1929 “blind” flight by Jimmy Doolittle.

While her husband went on to buy silver and gold mines and much of Benedict Canyon outside Los Angeles, they lived on opposite coasts, Eva finally settling at 1010 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where she wrote a children’s book and supported Australian playwright Ray Mathew for two decades.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a dazzling painting of Saint Maurice by Lucas Cranach the Elder that Eva Kollsman bequeathed.

“Portrait of Jose M Torres”

“L’Age d’Or” had a warm reception at its premiere at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930, accompanied by an exhibition of the surrealist group’s paintings and sculpture in the cinema lobby, but members of the right-wing League of Patriots came to see it on the third night and rioted in protest, destroying many of the artworks on display.

Dali reckoned the scene in which the protagonist displayed his unfulfilled love by sucking on the big toe of a marble Apollo had the biggest impact, but no one had reckoned on the fury the movie would soon provoke.

“The audience was almost wholly sympathetic to surrealism,” was how Dali, in his 1942 autobiography, remembered the first night. “Only a few noisy laughs and a few protests, quickly drowned out by the frenzied applause of the majority of the hall … But two days later it was a different story.”

Onscreen, a luxury car pulls up and a liveried chauffeur emerges. The passenger door opens and a pair of fetching woman’s legs swing out.

“At this moment, at a pre-arranged signal, an organised group of the ‘King’s Henchmen’ proceeded to toss bottles full of black ink that went crashing into the screen.

“Simultaneously, to the cries of ‘Down with the Germans!’ they fired their revolvers in the air, at the same time throwing stink bombs and tear-gas bombs.”

The thugs beat other audience members with blackjacks and rampaged through the lobby. An usher thought to rescue a Dali painting by hiding it in the restroom, “but the rest were mercilessly torn to shreds”.

While Bunuel bolted for Hollywood, hopes and ambitions in his pocket, the next day’s newspapers were full of horror — over both the film and the melee it sparked — prompting police to ban further screenings.

Dali feared he might be kicked out of France, until a tide of public opinion rose in the movie’s defence, but the subsequent reluctance of others to collaborate with him became a sword of Damocles over his head.

Little did people realise that Dali’s plans for “The Golden Age” were far more excessive than what appeared in the final cut. He’d been busy fishing for patrons for his painting in Paris while Bunuel — seen at right is his friend’s 1924 portrait — completed the movie on his own.

“I was terribly disappointed,” Dali said in hindsight, “for it was but a caricature of my ideas. The ‘Catholic’ side of it had become crudely anti-clerical, and without the biological poetry that I had desired …

“I accepted the responsibility for the sacrilegious scandal, though I had had no such ambition. I should have been willing to cause a scandal a hundred times greater, but for ‘important reasons’ — subversive rather through excess of Catholic fanaticism than through naive anti-clericalism.

“Nevertheless I realised that in spite of everything the film possessed an undeniable evocative strength, and that my disavowal of the film would have been understood by no one. I therefore resolved to accept all the consequences.”

Dali’s ties to the surrealist group were thus forged in violence, even as co-founder Andre Breton shuddered at Dali’s evident political conservatism.

Dali showed his team spirit by designing the cover for the Second Surrealist Manifesto and published his own manifesto in rhyme called “L’Ane Pourri” in the magazine Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution. This is where he first unveiled his theory of the paranoiac-critical method — a spontaneous mode of irrational understanding by seeing something two different ways, implying a revelation of its true nature.

On his return to Paris in 1930 Dali decided that the capital had been transformed by the imprint he’d left on it, the citizenry displaying a new affection for both the modern and the nostalgic — meaning fin de siecle fancies. He walked the streets “without being able to ‘do anything’.

“Everyone managed to carry out my ideas, though in a mediocre way. I was unable to carry them out in any way at all!”

He strived to come up with something fresher still, and “drew up a list of the most varied inventions, which I considered infallible”.

These included:

* artificial fingernails with mirrors
* shop mannequins that could be filled with water so that goldfish could swim around inside
* bakelite furniture moulded to the buyer’s body
* masks with camera that reporters could wear
* kaleidoscopic spectacles to wear on boring car trips
* shoes with springs to make walking more fun
* a cinema where viewers could reach out and touch what was appearing on the screen — “silk fabrics, fur, oysters, flesh, sand, dog, etc”
* a series of unexpected shapes for bathtubs
* objects that could be thrown and shattered against the wall in a fit of rage
* and objects for which no satisfactory place could be found to put them, thus creating anxiety “that would cease only the moment one got rid of them”.

The insides of the pockets light up at night!

“It was my contention that these objects would have a great commercial success,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “for everyone underestimated the unconscious masochistic buyer who was avidly looking for the object capable of making him suffer in the most indefinite and least obvious way.”

It fell to Gala to go out and try to flog these unpatented dreams, but she was told every time that the ideas were too mad and impractical. This also applied to her husband’s “whole catalogue of streamlined designs for automobiles, which were those that would be called streamlined 10 years later”.

“I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualised, why they should behave with such great collective uniformity,” Dali lamented on another occasion.

“Take such a simple thing as amusing oneself by derailing trains! Think of the thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks that cover the earth … and what a negligible percentage of those who have a passion for derailing trains ever put it into practice, as compared to the number who have a passion for travelling!

“I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I cannot understand why bus drivers should not have a desire once in a while to crash into a five-and-ten-cent store window and catch a few toys on the fly for their wives, and amuse the children who happened to be around.

“I do not understand, I cannot understand why toilet manufacturers do not put concealed bombs in the flushing compartment of their products which would burst the moment certain politicians pulled the chain …

“I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone …

“Telephone frappe, mint-coloured telephone, aphrodisiac telephone, lobster telephone, telephone sheathed in sable for the boudoirs of sirens with fingernails protected with ermine, Edgar Allan Poe telephones with a dead rat concealed within, … telephones on the leash which would walk about, screwed to the back of a living turtle … telephones … telephones … telephones.”

The lobster telephone would, of course, arrive in due time.