Museum of the Strange and Deranged Salvador Dali

Visit the Salvador Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueres, Spain to view the world’s largest piece of surrealist art.

The museum, designed by Dalí, has a touch of all the oddness and abnormality that is prevalent in his work. Here, some of the Figueres native’s finest pieces, as well as full-room pieces created explicitly for the museum, are on permanent display. The Dalí museum holds it all from recreating the sex-appeal of May West in an exhibit made of giant lips, eyes, and blond hair to ceiling paintings of melting watches and elephants. The building was completed in 1974 atop the rubble of the original Figueres Theater, which was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.

“Some of his stuff was kind of disturbing but it was good,” said Krystle Yague, an international student visiting the museum. “He was brilliant.”

Dalí is most known for his surrealist paintings. Pictures of melting clocks and semi-human figures blurred into objects are typical, but realism and cubism works can be found here as well.

“I feel like he took the weirdest stuff he could find and put it together, but it made sense. It turned into art,” Yague said.

Dalí’s surrealist work was partly inspired by a method he developed all of his own — the paranoid critical method. The method is the way of perceiving reality an artist uses to find different ways to view the world, such as his painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus. The artwork seems to be of two bony hands with eggs perched on the fingertips emerging from a pool of water, but it the figure of a thin Narcissus with a sulking head appears on the left.

Dalí’s artwork was not restricted to the canvas. He designed jewelry, crafted sculptures and painted the entire ceiling of the Palace of the Wind, an ambient parlor on the second floor. The ceiling is resonant of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, with immaculate detail and surreal religious allusions. The work portrays a barefoot Dalí and wife Gala in a near-embrace above a cloud of angelic figures. A scene of the Apocalypse, where melting clocks and broken wheels cascade over crowds of confused figures, borders one end of the ceiling while a scene of the two entering paradise contrast the other.

Dalí’s most concrete inspiration was by far his wife with whom he was madly in love and includes in his works. However, they lived several miles apart and Gala had many lovers.

The Spanish crown bestowed the title of Marquis to the Dali before his death, a title written on his crypt in the belly of the museum where the artist rests beneath his life works.

Published in University Star, October 22, 2008, Volume 98, No. 24