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”.

“Figure and Drapery in a Landscape”, circa 1934

America makes its choices, Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “with all the unfathomable and elementary force of her unique and intact biology”.

“She knows, as does no one else, what she lacks, what she does not have. And all that America ‘did not have’ on the spiritual plane, I was going to bring her … precisely the horror of my rotten donkeys from Spain, of the spectral aspect of the Christs of El Greco, of the whirling of the fiery sunflowers of Van Gogh, of the airy quality of Chanel’s decolletes, of the oddness of fur cups, of the metaphysics of the surrealist mannequins of Paris, of the apotheosis of the symphonic and Wagnerian architecture of Gaudi, of Rome, Toledo and Mediterranean Catholicism.”

In 1934, following his row with the other surrealists, his expulsion from his father’s home, his marriage to Gala, and his solo London show, Dali had been talking about the United States with Alfred H Barr Jr, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who he met at the Vicomte de Noailles’ place in Paris.

“His information on the subject of modern art was enormous. By contrast with our European directors of modern museums, most of whom still had not heard of Picasso, Alfred Barr’s erudition verged on the monstrous. Mrs Barr, who spoke French, prophesied that I would have a dazzling future in America, and encouraged me to go there.”

He and Gala dearly wanted to go, but had no money. Fortunately, Rene Crevel had introduced them to another wealthy American, Caresse Crosby, who’d bought Le Moulin du Soleil in the Forest of Ermenonville, northeast of Paris in Oise.

She and Dali plotted to build the 15-metre oven there that he needed to bake his giant loaf of bread with which to befuddle the masses.

Below is a Google Earth view of the forest itself.

A few years later, in June 1940, 800 hectares of trees were destroyed in a fire, and in 1974, in about this spot, Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed here. A memorial recalls the 346 victims.

“Every weekend we went to the Moulin du Soleil,” Dali wrote. “We ate in the horse stable, filled with tiger skins and stuffed parrots.”

Surrealists and society people were drawn to the place knowing “things were happening” there. The phonograph played Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” constantly and Dali glimpsed for the first time The New Yorker and Town & Country, lapping up the images of America.

“I want to go to America, I want to go to America … This was assuming the form of a childish caprice. Gala would console me: as soon as we could scrape together enough money we would go!”

Dali claimed to have realised that nothing was really stopping him from getting to New York when one day he lashed out at a “repugnant” legless blind man rolling along Boulevard Edgar-Quinet on a wheeled cart. He kicked the cart and sent it scurrying, and it dawned on him that he was neither blind, lame nor “plunged in abjection”. So he booked passage on the Champlain.

Possibly it was karma that made his first ocean crossing so horrific. Supposedly with a $500 loan from Picasso, he and Gala set sail on the Champlain in late autumn.

“As soon as I felt myself on the high seas, a great fear of the ‘ocean space’ took hold of me. I had never yet in my life sailed out of sight of land, and the creakings of the ship appeared to me more and more suspect.”

Catastrophe loomed, Dali was sure, so he attended every safety drill strapped into his life jacket, which he kept on even lying on his bunk in their cabin. Gala found him pathetic and hilarious by turns.

Glowering at the ship’s officers “as my executioners”, Salvador downed champagne constantly. Meanwhile Caresse Crosby, also on board, was asking the captain how long a loaf of French bread the galley might manage. The baker came up with a baguette two and a half metres long.

Tipped off by Crosby and keen to meet Dali, reporters boarded the ship when it reached New York at noon on November 14, and he duly produced his loaf — which the newshounds duly ignored. In an even bigger surprise, “They knew stupefying details about my life.”

“They immediately asked me if it was true that I had just painted a portrait of my wife with a pair of fried chops balanced on her shoulder. I answered yes, except that they we’re not fried, but raw.

“Why raw? they immediately asked me. I told them that it was because my wife was raw too.

“But why the chops together with your wife? I answered that I liked my wife, and that I liked chops, and that I saw no reason why I should not paint them together.”

See this post for more about what became the Dalis’ penchant for ocean voyages.

Finally on terra firma, the newlyweds stayed at the St Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, now the Ritz Carlton, on the seventh floor. Their first dinner engagement was with the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson, who will be making more appearances in Dali’s life shortly.

“Javanese Mannequin”, 1934

On his first night in New York Dali had a dream “involving eroticism and lions”. He awoke early in the morning to and could still hear lions roaring, now mingled with the sound of ducks quacking and other animal noises. The waiter who brought breakfast explained that the hotel was right across the road from the Central Park Zoo.

Another lion’s roar — at the Barcelona Zoo — inspired the elongated limbs, heads and rumps that Dali so often painted resting on crutches. He pictured the roar extending out from the animal’s mouth. “I conceived these distortions,” he wrote, “whose prolonged appendix forms represent in my aesthetic system something like the ‘cavernous roarings of form’.”

At right, “Manhattan Skyline”, sometimes identified as “La Lune”, done years later.

Dali commemorated their American debut with an elegy to the Big Apple’s phallic towers:

“New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!

“New York, granite sentinel facing Asia, resurrection of the Atlantic dream, Atlantis of the subconscious. New York, the stark folly of whose historic wardrobes gnaws away at the earth around the foundations and swells the inverted cupolas of your thousand new religions.

“What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus lighted the venomous colors that flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?

“New York, your cathedrals sit knitting stockings in the shadow of gigantic banks, stockings and mittens for the Negro quintuplets who will be born in Virginia, stockings and mittens for the swallows, drunk and drenched with Coca-Cola, who have strayed into the dirty kitchens of the Italian quarter and hang over the edge of tables like black Jewish neckties soaked in the rain and waiting for the snappy, sizzling stroke of the iron of the coming elections to make them edible, crisp as a charred slice of bacon.

“New York, your beheaded mannequins are already asleep, spilling all their ‘perpetual blood’ which flows like the ’surgical fountains of publicity’ within the display windows dazzling with electricity, contaminated with ‘lethargic surrealism’.

“And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of explosive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Booml Booml Booml

“I salute you, explosive giraffes of New York, and all you forerunners of the irrational — Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain!”

What Dali saw himself as bringing to the New World was an “infekzious poizun”, the surrealism he would inject into America’s bloodstream. The Land of the Free was swiftly addicted.

Below, “Gangsterism and Goofy Visions of New York”, an illustration for a series of articles about American life that Dalí wrote for The American Weekly from 1934 to 1935.

“Group of Women Imitating the Gestures of a Schooner”, 1940

Fleeing the European inferno, Dali and Gala sailed once more to New York on the Excambion, arriving from Lisbon on August 16 or 17, 1940. Sources differ on the date, and about whether Picasso helped finance this trip as well, as he’d purportedly done in 1934.

Interestingly, before Dali got on the ship, he dragged himself onto an airplane for the first time in his life. To catch up with Gala in Lisbon — he’d been to Cadaques to see his family — Dali was persuaded to fly from Madrid.

It couldn’t have been a pleasant experience: he maintained a fear of flying all his life. In the photo below, a grimace creases his face on a painfully necessary transatlantic flight in the 1970s, with his secretary Enrique Sabater. Amanda Lear allegedly helped him out with a barbiturate, although he had no affection for drugs either.

Again in 1940, on their arrival in America, there were eager reporters waiting at the dock, knowing Dali always made for an interesting story, and this time, because of the war, his tale had plenty of drama too.

The couple would remain for eight years, dividing their time between New York, California and Virginia.

Sal’s ramble across the ramblas over the years included the Real Palace, where his painting “The Battle of Tetuan” hung in 1962; the Galeria d’Art de Catalunya, where he had his first show of surrealist work in Spain in 1933; Picasso and Salvador’s father’s hangout The Four Cats; the Caixa Forum, where a major retrospective was held in 2004; and the places mentioned below.

Downtown, far from Gaudi’s wonderpark, is the Hotel Ritz, which, after he became famous, Dali made his home anytime he was in Barcelona.

As he did at the Meurice in Paris and the St Regis in New York, he put his stamp on the Ritz, once ordering a horse brought to his suite, “either stuffed or dissected, according to which story you believe”, as Britain’s Independent put it. The Times, curiously, has him leading a very-much-alive horse up the stairs.

Since 2005 the Ritz on tree-lined Gran Via has been the Hotel Palace Barcelona, but its website, without mentioning the horse, makes sure everyone knows that Salvador Dali slept there.

So too did the kings of Spain and Italy and the president of France in the decades following its construction in 1919, and later Heinrich Himmler, Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Woody Allen, Roger Moore and Paul and Linda McCartney. But none of those celebrities have suites named for them.

Suite 108 (other sources say it was 110), his luxurious double room with a sunken “Roman bath”, was fussily rechristened the Royal Suite Salvador Dali in 2004 to mark the centenary of his birth. The hotel filled it with journalists for the announcement, just as Dali had done on several memorable occasions when he had something of import to export.

The teenage Dali often came to see his uncles in Barcelona, where his parents had wed. Rafael would take him to the Ateneu Barcelona, a theatre that’s still open; Anselm had a bookshop and fed him things to read.

It wasn’t long before his paintings were on exhibit in the city, at the Dalmau Galleries. Not long after that the Dalmau and every other Barcelona gallery refused to show his supposedly lewd “Dialogue on the Beach”.

He used to meet Lorca at a bar called Oro del Rhin. It’s long since gone, but the place they’d usually end up, the 1850-vintage Hotel Condal, is still filling its 53 rooms.

Politics kept Dali away from Barcelona for 13 years, but after he’d made his return in fine style in 1948, with Gala at his side in a Cadillac he brought over from America, he was a regular at both the Liceu Opera House and El Molino, a sex cabaret.

The Liceu opened in 1847 and twice burnt down, though Dali was nowhere near the place either time (not yet born in 1861 and already dead in 1994). It’s still carrying on, and El Molino continues to usher guests through its doors beneath a faux windmill, more than a century after it opened as The Catalan Birdcage.

Somehow the cops always left it alone, right through its reincarnation as Le Petit Moulin Rouge, when the can-can girl of Paris came to town, and the Franco years, when the word “rouge” was banned, so it was just The Moulin — El Molino, The Windmill.

When dinnertime arrived, Dali had a table permanently reserved at the Via Veneto, which opened in the 1960s and serves on today. Owner Josep Monje provided his favourites — lobsters with mayonnaise, raspberry soufflé and crema catalana — but also remembers him ordering birds on the wing.

“He said they should fly into the restaurant,” Monje told the Times. “We cooked the birds, then tied them to a dish with fishing line so they would swing into the room as if they were flying. Don Salvador was delighted.”

Another time Dali wanted six raw Catalan sausage “necklaces”, and with these he garlanded six models at one of his happenings. Guests these days can look for the Don’s signature on a mirror in the restaurant.