More about mystery in Dali’s art, an extension of this post.

In online blurbs and press releases, self-styled “Dalinean researcher” Roger Michel Erasmy continues to churn out “explanations” of Dali’s supposed magical or psychic precognition.

He earns his living writing books, though. “Le mystère de la gare de Perpignan” (1985), “Codex Dalianus” (1989) and “L’Apothéose du Dollar” (2004) present a more or less apocalyptic vision drawn from cryptic messages inferred from Dali’s canvases.

“Topical Abduction of Europe” (1983), from the elderly Dali’s “catastrophe series”, seems to be Erasmy’s launching pad, and Erasmy sees his oracle proved right in the politico-economic grappling of the European Union, with France’s May 2005 rejection of the European Constitution treaty being crucial evidence.

Dali, says Erasmy, foresaw the fall of the Nazism in “The Enigma of Hitler” (1939, detail here, with the Fuhrer circled) and the collapse of communism in both “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933, detail below), with Lenin knelt at his own coffin, and “Partial Hallucination — Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano” (1931, shown further down).

Dali also predicted the 9/11 attacks (though I haven’t been able to identify in which artwork) and, as read in the “emblematic table” seen in “The Apotheosis of the Dollar” (1965, also further down), the disaster of the US-led war in Iraq.

Andrew Roberts, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900″, pointed out that the “newspaper” Dali once briefly circulated, the Dali News, had on November 25, 1947, published prophecies for the coming 10 years.

“The painter predicted such forthcoming occurrences as ‘The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas shall be revised by the atom cooked three times’ and ‘An American art critic of Irish blood shall win fame defending the Dalinian theory of painting.’

“He also predicted,” Roberts wrote, “that ‘Belgium shall know glory in legislation and finance’. Sure enough, 10 years later, that country became the focus for a new Great Power in the world.”

The European Economic Community came into being with a treaty signed in Rome on March 25, 1957, and the Belgian capital, Brussels, became the centre of the new European Union’s legislative and financial power.

Erasmy seems to believe that the figure sitting back from the piano keyboard in “Partial Hallucination” is Boris Yeltsin (it looks more like Max Ernst to me). The overall message is a warning about Russian aggression, he claims, drawing a line to Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and the intervention of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then also heading the European Union. Ukraine, however, remains vulnerable, Erasmy has noted.

“The new geopolitical order described by Dali does not correspond at all to the hegemonic ideas of President Bush, nor to the futuristic designs of the eurocrats of Brussels,” Erasmy wrote in 2007.

“Tuna Fishing” (1967) evidently foresaw the European Union’s 2008 decision to shut down Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishing, which caused an uproar in France.

The interpretations that Erasmy has shared for free on his Dali Décodé website and blog haven’t always enjoyed the success he claims his three books have met with the reading public.

The Frenchman’s divinations of the prophetic meanings in Dali’s art failed signally in 2007 when French voters chose Sarkozy as president over Ségolène Royal.

What made Erasmy so sure that Royal would win the election?

Because the other Dali painting on which he’s built a career — “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan” — supposedly contains the “code” 229 CL 66.

This “message” Erasmy transcribes (by means I don’t understand). via the date of modern France’s founding, September 22, 1792, to Royal’s birthdate, September 22, 1953.

And then there was this postage stamp Dali designed in 1978, depicting Dante’s Béatrice, which Erasmy said presents the “myth-sign of Marianne”.

The stamp went on sale on November 17, 1979, he pointed out — and on the 27th anniversary of that date Royal was nominated as her Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency. (Wikipedia says Royal was nominated on the 16th.)

Dali, Erasmy continued, produced no fewer than 64 variations on Millet’s popular painting “The Angelus” and insisted that the woman in the picture was a dominating “praying mantis” ready to crush the man. (Shown here are the left and right components of the stereoscopic “The Eye of the Angelus” from 1978.)

This woman, said Erasmy, is Ségolène Royal, who hails from and is president of the Poitou-Charentes region, where the repetition of the Angelus prayer was first introduced in 1318.

Dali Planet has much more about Dali and the Angelus in this post.

Finally, Erasmy noted, Cécilia Sarkozy — then still the wife of the eventual president — is the great-granddaughter of the celebrated Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz, for whom the city of Barcelona built a “palace” in 1929.

Forty years later Dali was asked to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Palauet Albéniz (see this post), and did so with the coming reinvestiture of King Juan Carlos in mind. He called his mural “The Hour of the Monarchy” and this, in Erasmy’s mind, was a nod to Ségolène “Royal”.

Erasmy was surely on safer ground forecasting Barack Obama’s election on the basis of Dali’s “Poetry of America” (1943), which contains an acknowledged allusion to the evolving acceptance of racial equality.

Far less convincing is his claim that Obama’s effort to save the US auto industry was somehow foreshadowed in “The Appearance of the Town of Delft” (1936), with its vegetative car rotting from the roots.

And who has the energy to argue when he says the 2009 financial crisis was there for everyone to see in “Apotheosis of the Dollar”, and perhaps in “The Basket of Bread” as well?

The full title of the former painting is “Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain which Is the Invisible Face, but Monumental, of Hermes by Praxiteles”.

Dali traced the moire patterns from an image projected on the canvas, just as the Old Masters had done in previous centuries to ensure precise measurements and perspective.

Although Erasmy didn’t specify which version of “Bread”, it’s a safe guess he was referring to the 1945 one (they’re quite similar anyway). The basket, he said, forms “a notation symbolic of the stock exchange” and the nub of a loaf suggests a severed penis. Thus the fiscal crisis marks the end of “a system built on phallic capacity, from now on threatened by the emancipation of women” (Erasmy champions Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel as well as Royal).

Erasmy seems to have done Dali’s admirers a more palpable service in locating the railway coach that was depicted in “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan”.

He claims to have found the car in 1986, abandoned behind the station and occupied, suitably enough, by a “tramp”. He talked the local transport firm Raymondis, which owned it, into letting him convert it into a “cultural platform”.

By 1994 Erasmy had the railroad coach in the “Dali Triangle” and the following year publicly inaugurated it in front of the press with the help of television celebrity Marlène Mourreau, who Erasmy said was “selected as godmother” to the project on the basis of her physical assets, “in conformity with the erotic phantasms of Salvador Dali”.

When last heard of — there were no updates on the website about this the last time I looked — the “Dali Wagon” was headed for Wolnzach in Bavaria in October 2005 for an exhibition of the work of 10 Eastern European surrealist artists calling themselves the “Heirs to Dali”.

This collective had been assembled by a German painter who goes by the names Angerer-DER-Aeltere and Ludwig Angerer the Elder and also includes Frenchmen Jean-Pierre Alaux, Jean Bailly, Yo Coquelin, Lukás Kándl, Jacques Resch, Jean Reus and Eli Tiunine, Miguel Garcia-Diez of Spain and Michael Maschka, another German.

What exactly happened to the Heirs’ proposed exhibition in May 2005 at the Place du Pantheon in Paris’ fifth arrondissement isn’t quite clear from Erasmy’s website. The event appears to have been originally planned to coincide with the centenary of Dali’s birth in 2004 and, with the Dali Wagon included, was deemed part of a project called “Train of Fantastic Art” (TAF 2004).

Art dealer Stephan Gissinger and Yo Coquelin, one of the Heirs, made the arrangements with the Town Hall, but everything fell apart, Erasmy claimed, due to “jealousies and meanness” involving a “cabal” that opposed him. Nothing seems to have happened in 2005 either.

Architect and painter Angerer designed a logo for the project from a likeness of Dali. His striking painting shown alongside it below is titled “Moderne Schoenheit 2″.

The 10 Heirs did manage to hold a show in 2007, however, at the thermal springs in Mont-Dore, west of Lyon. Michael Maschka won a trophy called the “Apocalypse Dore” for his painting “Travels to the Crystal Mountains”.

“The Black Mass”, 1974

Getting back to Dali himself, and along the same spooky lines, the maestro’s superstitions are well documented, but there’s room for speculation as to just how much he delved into the supernatural, apart from its utility to any hard-working surrealist.

Amanda Lear has recorded that anything green meant bad luck to Dali, and he “hated” green parrots as a result. Ill fortune also came from peacock feathers and starting a journey and marrying on a Tuesday.

He always carried a wooden talisman “wrapped in a sock and secured with a rubber band”.

Gala, he wrote, “believes in my wood — a piece of wood that I found at the beginning of our acquaintance among the rocks of Cape Creus, under extraordinary circumstances. Since then we have never been without this ‘pure Dalinian fetish’, though we have lost it on several occasions.

“Once we lost it in Covent Garden in London, and found in again the next day. Another time it had been taken out with the bed sheets. It was necessary to go minutely over the whole laundry of the Hotel St Moritz, yet we finally found it.

“This piece of wood has assumed in my mind the form of a compulsive maniacal neurosis. When I get the idea that I ought to go and touch it, I cannot resist doing it. At this very moment I am forced to get up to go and touch it … There, I have just touched it, and with this my anxiety, which otherwise would only have grown agonizingly, has been calmed.”

Gala had a chunk of wood just the same, and when she died, Dali gave it to Lear.

On one occasion when Lear’s love life was in turmoil, Dali went hunting for a particular carbuncle that would put things right.

In a 1939 letter to Luis Bunuel, Dali wrote: “For three years now I’ve been occupying myself passionately with all matters relating to ‘objective chance’. Destiny, prophetic dreams, interpretation of the smallest events in daily life in order to act in consequence, chiromancy, astrology, etc etc.”

At the Dali Museum in Florida in 2008, lecturer Vickie Brunner focused on “Dali, Women and the Occult”. She began with Lydia (often spelled Lidia) Noguer, the so-called “last witch of Cape Creus” to whom Dali referred in his autobiography “The Secret Life” as the “Godmother of my madness”. Noguer told biographer Ian Gibson that she was “the witch responsible for the whole business of Dali and a whole lot more besides”.

“Lidia de Cadaques”, 1954

Pictured here is the cover of a local history about Lydia published in 1954 by the celebrated author Eugeni d’Ors, featuring illustrations by Dali including the one above.

Noguer, who died in an asylum, was the person Dali turned to in 1930 after his father disowned him. He needed a place to live, so she sold the 26-year-old a fisherman’s derelict hut in Port Lligat, and it became his and Gala’s home — and the basis for the house they always kept, now the Dali House-Museum.

Dali wrote sentimentally about Lydia in his 1942 autobiography, recalling his and Gala’s return home after their second pre-war trip to the US. He refers to her using Eugeni d’Ors’ compliment, “La Ben Plantada” — the “well-planted woman”. Earlier he’d attached the description to his beautiful childhood neighbour Ursula (see this post).

“We arrived in Port Lligat toward the end of a very bright December afternoon. Never had I understood so well how beautiful the landscape of Port Lligat was …

“Already from afar we perceived the figure of Lydia ‘La Ben Plantada’, dressed in black and seated on the threshold of the door to our house, awaiting our return.

“When we got close, Lydia got up and came to meet us. She was weeping. We went inside, and she confided to us that her life with her two sons had become unbearable.

“Her sons no longer went fishing; they spoke only of their [imagined] radium mines; they spent most of the time lying on their pallets. Sometimes they would weep; sometimes, taken with dreadful fits, they would beat her. She showed us a scar on her head, pulling aside two strands of her white hair, and let us see the blue marks all over her body. A week later her two sons were sent to the madhouse in Gerona.

“In the afternoons Lydia would come to the house and weep. Port Lligat was solitary. A violent and persistent wind prevented the fishermen from going out to fish, and only the famished cats would skulk around our little house.”

Lydia puts in an appearance in the post about the Lligat house as well.

Much has been written about Gala’s talent with the tarot deck. Dali believed she could read the future in the cards and, according to Tim McGirk and Meryle Seacrest’s book “The Wicked Lady”, she did indeed foretell the day the day Nazi Germany would invade France.

She would consult the oracle every evening under an olive tree in their garden (or every morning, according to another source), and Dali would decide accordingly whether it was appropriate to do some painting that day or the next.

Gala’s engagement in such things had early on piqued the interest of the surrealists, who sought to channel the subconscious through hypnosis, thought-transference, seances and automatic writing.

While she was still living with Paul Eluard, before Dali arrived from Spain, there were weekends of group experimentation, and they tried to interpret each other’s dreams. The poet Robert Desnos would writhe around in a trance and then begin automatic writing.

Rachel Pollack’s book Salvador Dali’s Tarot” claimed it was Gala who “nurtured his interest in mysticism”, and to repay her he produced a deck featuring original paintings. But Amanda Lear, in “My Life with Salvador Dali”, says Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, commissioned the cards, and Dali in fact put her in charge of the designs.

Broccoli, wrote Lear, was making “Live and Let Die”, which had a black-magic theme, and Dali accepted the commission but soon bored of it, so he turned to her. She did the research and made collages from reproductions of Dali works in his books.

Pollack noted that the Dali Tarot, with Hebrew letters on the trump cards, drew on the Jewish Kabbalah. The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet corresponded to the 22 trumps of tarot’s Major Arcana, four worlds of existence and 10 stations on the tree of life to the four suits of 10 numbered cards.

When Gala and Dali moved to Arcachon in the south of France in 1939, distancing themselves from the onslaught of war, their next-door neighbour was Leonore Fini, an artist even more eccentric than Salvador. She was involved in alchemy.

Amanda Lear described her at a restaurant outing in Paris as bringing “her own court” and wearing a full-length gown topped by a magician’s cape”.

“She had stars in her hair and carried a wand like a scepter.”

In 1939 Fini was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst’s partner, and the three of them shared an interest in alchemy and ritual magic. In answer to her question, Dali said he too believed in magic.

“It is the most primitive of all the religions,” he told her. “Man will always need magic. Superstition is simply the application of magic to everyday life.”

“I am not a mystic,” Dali was quoted as saying in Carlos Rojas’ book “Dali or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

“I think I may be a pre-mystic, for since my childhood I have been in a state of pre-mysticism. I was impelled towards celestial things, even via evil [posession].”

On the other hand, it depends. In 1960 he told a New York Herald Tribunes reporter, “I am not only a mystic, I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, St John of the Cross.”

He had vivid memories of being St John and could recall the experiences of the monkhood as well as “divine union”. He did indeed depict himself as a Franciscian monk in “Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”.

An admirer of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, Dali felt that Christian mysticism might offer a door to the unknown.

Fleur Cowles, who wrote “The Case of Salvador Dali”, said he told her in 1957 that the “idea of an angel” stimulated him immensely, and he saw protons and neutrons as angelic elements. While he’d played a game called Seeing Angels as a child, which involved pressing against the eyeballs hard enough to produce phosphene images, he now believed in real angels, often embodied as people he loved and admired.

Amanda Lear recalled Dali spending an “entire winter researching old volumes regarding the study of odours. He theorised that the saintly odours of certain martyrs (such as the scent of violets) were directly related to the moral quality of the individual.” Only mystics were free of body odour, he speculated, and, since Lear didn’t perspire, she was “angelic”.

“The Font”, 1930

In January 1930, flush with the success of his sold-out show at the Goemans Gallery the previous month, Dali brought Gala here to Carry-le-Rouet on the Cote d’Azur where, until March 8, they took rooms at the Hotel du Chateau de Carry — “where no one could come and ferret us out”.

Carry-le-Rouet is today proudest of being the long-time summer home of the beloved film comedian Fernandel — whose portrait Dali would have painted, “disguised as a Velasquez dwarf”, had the war not intervened.

Gala was suffering with an unspecified gynaecological problem (she’d had herself sterilised after the birth of her and Paul Eluard’s daughter Cecile), but Dali kept busy with his work, including the painting “The Invisible Man” and the book “The Visible Woman”.

“We had the hallway stacked with wood,” Dali wrote in his 1942 biography, “so that our fireplace would never for a moment be without a fire — and so that no one could come and disturb us on the pretext of bringing us wood … For two months we did not once go outdoors!”

He and Gala would long after remember this stay as “one of the most active, exciting and frenzied periods of our lives”, often saying to each other, “You remember the time at Carry-le-Rouet?” Gala foresaw lean times ahead, but not for long.

In her readings of the tarot cards she saw a dark man with money. This, as it turned out, was the art philanthropist the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, from whom an offer of help indeed soon arrived.

On hotel stationery Dali wrote to the Viscount about selling one of the three versions he’d just completed of “Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion”, and to Luis Bunuel about his new ideas for “l’Age d’Or”, the film they’d begun scripting the summer before in Cadaques.

“The Great Masturbator”, 1930

Following their two months of hiding out in Carry-le-Rouet on the wintry Cote d’Azur, Dali and Gala had a quick visit with Garcia Lorca in Madrid and then, in April 1930, enjoyed something of a “honeymoon” on the Spanish coast at Torremolinos, whose beach is pictured above.

Today the resort village has a Salvador Dali Avenue, although there’s nothing unusual about that in Spanish towns. The Dalis’ abode was far from the street that would be named after him.

“We rented a fisherman’s cottage which overlooked a field of carnations on the edge of a cliff falling abruptly into the sea. This was our honeymoon of fire! Our skins became dark as those of the fisher folk.”

Their bed was as hard as dry bread, Dali wrote, but he came to appreciate the “gentle bruises and aches” that resulted, “for then one perceives that one has a body, and that one is naked.

“Gala, with a build like a boy’s, burned by the sun, would walk about the village with her breasts bare, and I had taken to wearing my necklace again. The fishermen of this region had no modesty of any kind, and would drop their pants a few metres from us to perform their physical functions.”

Aware that he was close to Malaga here, on Picasso’s native turf, Dali admired the men lining up to take a shit and taking their time about it, all the while trading “epic obscenities” and cheering their children’s sling-shot battles.

The fights “often ended with a few cracked skulls”, he observed.

“The sight of their children’s blood would awaken a little the personal hostilities among the defecators and, quickly pulling up their trousers and carefully readjusting their genital parts, which were always of handsome and well-developed proportions, they would start arguing among themselves … and would in turn end the polemic with one or two knife jabs.”

Amid such reveries Dali continued with “The Invisible Man” on canvas and completed “The Visible Woman” on paper.

Their surrealist friends came to visit, and in their bickering over left and right ideologies Dali could see that Spain was destined for civil war, a Medusa with snakes in her belly rather than on her head, the “serpents mutually strangulating one another in a continual iliac passion of death and of erection”.

Bad news arrived in a batch: the Goemans Gallery, which still owed him money, was going bankrupt; Bunuel was going ahead with “L’Age d’Or” without Dali; the carpenter building their house in Port Lligat wanted more cash. Salvador and Gala found themselves without enough change to even get home.

Dali strode out among the dunes alone, punching himself in the face, but in the tooth he knocked out he found the key to hope. He recognised “the advantage of my infirmities” and saw how necessity might give birth to opportunity.

In Paris Dali had been seeing Picasso and Éluard twice a week, but “society people” every day. His and Gala’s best friends there were Coco Chanel and the Sert girls, sculptor Roussie and Bettina, another fashion designer. Dali called Bettina and Roussie “fairy skeletons of the sveltest poetry”.

Hailing from Georgia, Roussie (Roussivani) was the second wife of the muralist Jose Maria Sert, who in 1936 prodded Salvador to paint “The Great Paranoiac”, seen above. Dali had adored the gossip at the soirees hosted by Sert’s first wife Missie, as well.

Well-connected with eligible American women living in Paris, Roussie Sert was also the enabling sister of the skirt-chasing Mdivani brothers, who styled themselves “princes”. Between them over the years they married Pola Negri, Barbara Hutton, Louise Astor Van Alen and several other American heiresses.

It was Alexis Mdivani who wed Van Alen and then Hutton’s first husband, and then Van Alen married another brother, Serge. A third brother, David, married the American actress Mae Murray.

They and their sisters Roussie Sert and Nina Huberich became known as the “marrying Mdivanis”.

In the photo from 1925, Roussie sits between her sister, on the left, and an unidentified friend.

Jose Maria Sert had a house three hours’ drive from Port Lligat, above the beach in the Mas Juny in Castell, in Palamós, which Salvador and Gala often visited for weeks at a time with the rest of the gang from Paris. Marlene Dietrich and Luchino Visconti were also among the guests.

“This period of summer enchantment”, Dali wrote, “the last days of happiness of Europe” before the Spanish civil war and the world war that followed, ended for him on August 1, 1935, when Alexis Mdivani and his then-lover the Baroness Maud von Thyssen-Bornemisza were killed in a car accident on the road from Palamos to Figueras.

Jose Maria refused to return to Castell afterward, and Roussie, Dali recalled, “was to die of grief over this four years later. To tell you how much I loved this being I shall tell you only that she resembled — as two ‘pearls of death’ resemble each other — the portrait of the young girl by Vermeer of Delft in The Hague Museum.” He doubtless refers to “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, painted in about 1665.

On one of his visits to see Sert, Dali was set up with a tiny studio in a stone fishermen’s hut that’s recently been “rediscovered” and turned into a minor tourist attraction. You can read about the “archaeological” project on this website, from which the two photos below originate.

It was recognised for its significance in art history following a 2003 municipal survey of obsolete structures that might be removed in the interest of nature conservation. Three years later someone noticed a depiction of a horse on the wall of this one-time stable and it seemed like Dali’s work. A search of the property records showed that it no doubt was.

The “Dali Shack” has a door described in Catalan as la porta torta, which might translate just as suitably as “the awry door” or “porthole”.

Sert sold the property in 1944 to Albert Puig Palau, and it became something of a pilgrimage destination for artists and intellectuals, and with them Dali returned.

“Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History”, painted in 1935-6, contains at least two architectural elements that Dali drew from Palamos, according to his biographer Ian Gibson.

He reckoned the district’s the Casino La Unión echoes in the porch of the Chirico-style building on the left, while the prominent structure in the centre was modelled on the Art Nouveau palace of the Ribera family. Both buildings disappeared years ago.

The Spanish government’s formal declaration of the Dali homestead in Port Lligat as “a picturesque site of special interest to the nation” did more than flatter the maestro — it underscored his claim to divinity.

The announcement had turned his little corner of the world into “a Dalinian church”, he told Andre Parinaud for “The Unspeakable Confessions” in 1976.

At the time he planned on having his body preserved immediately after death so that he could be brought back to life at some point in the future.

“I should not be unhappy if some day humanity declared my person to be sacred and that from generation to generation the torch of my body were transmitted as the eternal witness to evolution.”

In his interviews with Parinaud, Dali declared himself a mystical spirit who could control space-time at will. His paintings were sacred masses through which he shared the eucharist of his knowledge with the followers of the “Dalinian mystique”, he said. “A new consciousness of humanity may start with me, Dali.”

“I can say that I am today the man nearest to the existence of God, the least mad of men and the term divine sometimes applied to me expresses an existential reality.”

Three decades earlier Dali hadn’t been nearly so exalted. In his 1942 autobiography “The Secret Life” he wrote of cherishing the house in Port Lligat, even if Gala was off in Paris soaking up luxury. He preferred the solitude.

“Port Lligat: a life of asceticism, of isolation. It was there that I learned to impoverish myself … A life that was hard, without metaphor or wine, a life with the light of eternity. The lucubrations of Paris, the lights of the city, and of the jewels of the Rue de la Paix, could not resist this other light — total, centuries-old, poor, serene and fearless.”

“Port Lligat is a place for accomplishments,” Dali declared on another occasion. “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.”

Salvador and Gala were roaming France when an offer of patronage came from the Vicomte de Noailles (read more about him in this post).

“I immediately thought of buying the shack belonging to Lydia’s sons at Port Lligat and of fixing it up to make it habitable,” Dali wrote years later, referring to Lydia Noguer, a fisherman’s wife in Cadaques who he’d known since his was a boy. Her sons used the hut for storage.

It “happened to be set exactly in the spot which I liked best in all the world. With the capriciousness which always characterises my decisions, it became in a moment the only spot where I would, where I could, live.”

Noailles fronted Dali 29,000 francs to buy the hut and he and Gala travelled to Cadaques, only to be turned away by the Hotel Miramar, Dali said, because it’s owner was “taking my father’s side” in the family row over Gala.

“We had to go to a tiny boarding house, where one of our former maids did everything she could to make our stay bearable. The only people with whom I was interested in keeping on good terms were the dozen fishermen of Port Lligat who, being more independent of the opinions of Cadaques, received us at first with reserve, but were quickly captivated by Gala’s irresistibly winning nature and by the aureole of my prestige.

“They knew that the papers were writing about me. ‘He’s young,’ they said. ‘He doesn’t need his father’s money. He’s free to do what he likes with his youth.’

“We hired a carpenter, and together Gala and I worked out all the details, from the number of steps there were to be in the stairway to the dimensions of the smallest window. None of the palaces of Ludwig II of Bavaria aroused one half the anxiety in his heart that this little shack kindled in ours.

“The shack was to be composed of one room about four metres square, which was to serve as dining room, bedroom, studio and entrance hall. One went up a few steps, and on a little hallway opened three doors leading to a shower, a toilet and a kitchen hardly big enough to move around in.

“I wanted it to be very small — the smaller, the more intra-uterine. We had brought the nickel and glass furniture from our Paris apartment, and we covered the walls with several coats of enamel. Not being in a position to carry out any of my delirious decorative ideas, I wanted only the exact proportions required by the two of us and the two of us alone.

“The only extravagant ornament which I planned to use was a very, very small milk tooth of mine which had never been replaced, and which I had just lost. It was white and transparent like a rice grain, and I wanted to pierce a hole in it and hang it by a thread from the mathematical centre of the ceiling.”

There were eventually nine fishermen’s huts in all, assembled gradually uphill. Dali ultimately realised it was “a true biological structure” where “each new pulse in our life has its own new cell, a room”.

Dali referred to Lydia Noguer in his autobiography “The Secret Life: as the “Godmother of my madness”, and when biographer Ian Gibson tracked her down, she wrote on the back of a photograph of herself, “This woman is the witch responsible for the whole business of Dali and a whole lot more besides”. What more? Read on in this post.

Life magazine pictures the colossus of Port Lligat Beach, and the master at work in his studio, apparently on “The Battle of Tetuan”. A blow-up of Velazquez’s self-portrait watches him, as does his own.

Below, another view of the studio. For conservation’s sake, visits today have to be arranged in advance, and access is not allowed to all areas, leaving guests often craning their necks to see what they can.

John Lanois caught the maestro peeking at the patio in 1965. Below, more relaxed with rams’ horns and coconut.

Outside the house today is the Clock Hut, where visitors can check their coats. Dali used to invite the local fishermen when they’d finished repainting their boats to use up the remaining paint by swabbing it on the doors of the hut. He called the multi-coloured results “the best abstract pictures in the history of painting”.

Guests enter the house itself via the Bear Lobby, from which the building spreads out in a labyrinth of narrow passageways and slight changes in floor level. All the windows have different shapes.

The ground floor and Rooms 7 to 12 were Salvador and Gala’s main living area, the studio and Rooms 5 and 6 his workplace, and their guests were entertained outside, in Room 13 and in the courtyards, now numbered 14 and 15.

On the terrace by the phallic pool is the little shrine of Pirelli tires and model bullfighters, and several chairs with six legs — the rear two on an outward angle — that a village artisan made for him because Dali so often leaned so far back in his chair that he tumbled over.

The telephone booth, routinely used by Dali’s guests, was supposedly one of the first installed in Spain.

And then there’s the dovecote that Dali fashioned out of plaster and wooden vineyard-tending forks on which birds could perch.

Below, the couple ensconsed after the place was as fixed up as it would ever get, photographed by Robert Descharnes.

In August 2009 the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation announced that another area of the property had been opened to visitors, an upper-floor “circular construction” Dali had used as a secondary workshop “to make sculptures and performances”.

Its skylight, the foundation said, allowed him to paint subjects from below. Perforated ceramic vases resonated to gusts of wind, and there is a piano Dali used during some of his “performances”.

In 1967, Edgar Froese, who would later that year form the rock band Tangerine Dream, was invited to perform at Dali’s “Happening Afternoons” at the house, while ballet dancers pirouetted to the music of Debussy on enormous water-borne eggshells.

For his part, Dali attempted to play Satie at the piano, waist-deep in seawater.

He loved having hippies around, although it wasn’t always clear whether their appeal lay in their rebelliousness, their love of parties or the media sensation they tended to cause.

Did he partake of drugs with them? Despite the seemingly unambiguous quote attributed to him — “I do not take drugs. I am drugs” — the debate remains an open one, even at the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, several of whose members knew Dali personally.

While one member points out that Dali “practically admitted to chewing hashish 10 times” in his book “50 Secrets”, another says he’d seen the maestro decline drugs when offered, and was in fact “quite afraid of them. He would not even accept royal jelly, which was all the rage in the early ’70s, fearing someone would lace it with drugs.”

Below, a photo of the pool and Dali’s own painting of it, one of several he did, this one from about 1970. Below those, a Google Earth image of the property.

On a hillside above the house was (possibly still is — I don’t know) “Debris Christ”, a 1969 sculpture made with tree limbs, earth, the shards of a small boat, tiles and other detritus that came to hand. It depicted the pain of the crucifixion, with gnarled, decaying roots forming the crown of thorns.

It was in the skeleton of Christ’s boat, Brian Sewell claims in “Dirty Dali” (see this source), that the maestro talked him into posing for photos while masturbating.

Somewhat drunk, Sewell agreed to curl up one of Jesus’ armpits, undress and masturbate while Dali took numerous pictures and occasionally groped himself.

The following night, Sewell said, Dali’s Cadillac delivered to the house a group of hippies, the young men among whom went off with Dali to be photographed. As far as the women were concerned, according to Sewell, Dali preferred them to watch him masturbate.

Amanda Lear also did a photo shoot in the Christ — see this post.

In September 1965, Paris Match magazine published a dazzling spread of photos by Tony Saunier depicting Dali playing host to “the queen of Venus” and her entourage among the flaming shards of Cap Creus.

“The Venusians have landed!” spread was touted as a “Dali-fiction spectacular”. The setting was Cadaques’ Couliaro inlet, where Dali and Bunuel had shot scenes for “L’Age d’Or” 35 years earlier. These images were kindly shared by Karl Heinz Klumpner, who points out that many more photos of the event were published in 2000 by Harry N Abrams in the book “Encounters with Great Painters — Taken from the Annals of Paris Match“.

Dali designed the costumes for the Venusian monarch and her amphibian royal guard, drawing inspiration, he said, “from the Egyptian statues at Luxor and the Perpignan train station”.

“Dali invites Federika, his invented queen of the Venusians, to dine at his table,” ran the accompanying text. “A prisoner of her S-shaped space suit, she nevertheless remains formal throughout the course of the meal. The tablecloth is peppered with sea urchins, ‘the only animal,’ Dali says, ‘capable of space travel’.”

“After their meal, the host has prepared a modest apocalypse: 132 gallons of gas poured into the sea and set on fire. That same afternoon, Dali prepares another tableau vivant: Venusians abducting Earthlings.”

The Deux Magots cafe in Paris’ Montparnasse district, above, was a favoured meeting spot for the surrealists, but it was at Andre Breton’s apartment at 42 rue Fontaine, shown on the left, where they held a mock trial to consider Dali’s crimes against the movement in February 1934. He was, after a brief reprieve, expelled from the group.

Below is a Google Street View of Breton’s place, the four-storey building on the far side of the Comedie de Paris Theatre. Note the windmill at the end of the street: the Moulin Rouge.

The members had taken offence at Dali’s “The Enigma of William Tell”, an unflattering portrait of Lenin, seen below (now at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet), as well as his commercial flair, Andre Breton later famously twisting his name into the anagram “Avida Dollars” — avid for dollars.

Breton called Dali a self-confessed racist who supported the fascists massing in Spain, Italy and Germany.

He’d seen Dali’s arrival in Paris six years earlier as just what the surrealists needed. They were by then already running dry of ideas. But Breton and Louis Aragon saw themselves as sophisticates in charge of a motley amalgam of foreign buffoons, including the original “Andalusian dogs”, Dali and Luis Bunuel. Dali in particular oozed warped pathologies, and his surrealism, it’s been noted, “was dangerously total”.

“The Enigma of William Tell” so infuriated Breton that on February 2 he’d sought to destroy it at the Exposition du Cinquantenaire in the Salon des Indépendants at the Grand Palais, a show the other surrealists boycotted, but it was hung beyond his reach.

Dali challenged Breton to convene the group for an emergency meeting “at which the mystique of Hitler shall be debated”, and Breton scheduled the duel for four days later.

Dali showed up with a thermometer in his mouth, claiming he felt ill, and while Breton reeled off his accusations, Dali kept checking his temperature.

When it was his turn to present his case, he began to remove his clothing piece by piece, while reciting a prepared speech in which he explained that his obsession with Hitler was at heart apolitical, and that he could not be a Nazi “because if Hitler were ever to conquer Europe, he would do away with hysterics of my kind, as had already happened in Germany”.

From Dali’s point of view, the surrealists’ leftist politics was dull and doomed. “Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit,” he declared, and to be sure, communism served only to handcuff their imagination.

Also in 1934, Dali suggested making a “thinking machine” — a rocking chair with numerous goblets of warm milk hanging from it. “Enough of Dali’s fantasies! Warm milk for the children of the unemployed!” roared Aragon, who Dali later characterised as “a nervous little Robespierre”.

Ironically, Breton saw from this incident that the communist faction in his movement was becoming a little too political and too zealous, and ended up ousting Aragon as well.

Dali, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret wrote in their biography, “enjoyed pomp and ritual, so he actually preferred monarchies to totalitarian regimes; the political Left was too drab and prosaic.

“To the surrealists he confessed, ‘Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all.’

“He regretted that the surrealists were attracting ‘a whole fauna of misfit and unwashed petty bourgeois’.”

In his autobiography “The Secret Life” Dali was steadfastly ambivalent: he was not a reactionary and supported no revolution, communist or fascist, believing only in himself. In fact, he said, he’d been pressed to side with either Stalin or Hitler and chose tradition over politics.

At right is the cartoonish “Hitler Masturbating”.

As to the Fuhrer specifically, Descharnes and Neret quoted him further: “Whenever I started to paint the leather strap that crossed from his belt to his shoulder, the softness of that Hitler flesh packed under his military tunic transported me into a sustaining and Wagnerian ecstasy that set my heart pounding, an extremely rare state of excitement that I did not even experience during the act of love.

On another occasion he admitted that he saw Hitler as a masochist determined to start a war and lose it in heroic style. Much more on Dali and Hitler in this post.

“On the one hand,” Dali wrote, evidently without irony, “I had society, politely astonished that I was going somewhere that they could not go, and on the other hand, the surrealists. I was always off to where the rest couldn’t go. Snobbery consists in going to places that others are excluded from — which produces a feeling of inferiority in the others. In all human relations there is a way of achieving complete mastery of a situation. That was my policy where surrealism was concerned.”

“All taboos are forbidden, or else a list has to be made of those to be observed,” Dali lamented of the surrealists when he recounted this drama to Andre Parinaud for 1993’s “The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali”.

“And let Breton formally state that the kingdom of surrealist poetry is nothing but a little domain used for the house arrest of those convicted felons placed under surveillance by the vice squad or the Communist Party.”

It was Dali’s repeated depictions of Hitler that proved the most intolerable to to Breton’s clique.

This was the ruling of their “court”:

“Dali, having been found guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose — despite his statement of 25 January 1934 — that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.”

He fended off expulsion for now by confessing allegiance to “the proletariat” and rejecting nazism. But he didn’t stop painting “offensive” pictures.

And racism? Dali made clear his disdain for modern art’s adoption of African sculpture, as seen in cubism and Modigliani’s tribal-mask-like portraits, but Breton said he’d gone much further.

“Dali even declared to me — and I listened carefully enough to assure myself that he was being completely serious — that the basic trouble confronting the world today was racial and that the only solution was for all the white races to band together and reduce all the coloured people to slavery.”

This comment from 1939 is quoted in Dawn Ades’ Dali biography, presumably from Breton’s article “Latest Tendencies in Surrealist Painting”, which precipitated Dali’s expulsion from the movement. By then famous, he didn’t care so much, even if the bitterness lingered.