The Pillars of Hercules

“I am the king of cuckolds!” Dalí shrieked as he saw Gala being rowed out to sea by a young fisherman who fancied her. Dalí indulged Gala in her preference for young handsome men. Gala was active with these studs well into her seventies, though the sexual athletics may also have shortened her life. When Gala died Dalí stopped eating and went off his head—or rather went madder in such a melancholy way that he ceased to paint.

He had delighted in being a spectator to Gala’s numerous romances and, intensely voyeuristic, he took his pleasure in watching the sexual act being performed live by hired hands in his castle. He inspires a similarly voyeuristic impulse in anyone who looks at his pictures. He invites voyeurism: you don’t enter his pictures, or even feel them much. You stand a few feet away, fascinated. It is hard to know what to think of the cannibals and giraffes and amputees in the pictures; it is also hard to look away, because Dalí has a diabolical mastery of space. And so you gape, a bit ashamed, a bit amused, mostly bewildered.

Although he cheerfully mutilated his pictorial subjects, he was capable of painting the human body in its most idealized form; and perhaps since the act of sodomy fascinated Dalí—he paid couples to perform it privately for him—he was at his most expressive and naturalistic when painting human buttocks. The shapely curves of thigh and back are found all over his work—not shocking at all, but lovingly presented, not an ant in sight, no disfigurement at all. A good example of this, one of his most brilliant bums, is the painting “Dalí Raising the Skin of the Mediterranean Sea to Show Gala the Birth of Venus.”

That painting hangs in the quirky Dalí Museum, one of Figueres’ former theaters, Dalí’s legacy and living joke. Dalí is also buried there, which ranks it as one of the more bizarre mausoleums in the world. Entering the museum is like walking inside Dalí’s teeming brain. He designed the museum and so it is as much his house as his head—his life’s work, perhaps his masterpiece of surrealism. It is an eccentric but well-arranged building, with a gift shop where you can buy Dalí tarot cards and Dalí scarves and even a melted wristwatch that gives the exact time.

Rooms and corridors, painted ceilings, monsters, masks, junk, a 1936 Cadillac with a fat seven-foot goddess straddling the hood and opera music blasting from the radiator grille. Elsewhere there are skeletons—dog skulls, croc skulls, an entire gorilla skeleton with the head of the Virgin Mary encased in the rib cage. The gorilla bones are gilded. There are ants everywhere. The unlikeliest objects such as chamber pots are covered in feathers; machine parts are coated in fur; human bodies in soup spoons.

A fetching photo of Dalí shows him wearing a loaf of bread on his head. His Venus de Milo has desk drawers for breasts. There is a shrine with big buckets and even bigger nudes, and “Sala de Mae West” is a pair of enormous lips and nostrils, with a specially erected viewing stand.

Much of it is mockery—of classicism, the Church, authority, women, convention, Christ, Spain. He did riffs on Velazquez, copies of Las Meninas, a satire of Millais in the style of Seurat, a satire of Picasso in the style of Picasso.

You need to be a talented Spaniard maddened by all that history and culture to explode like this. Obviously brilliant, often childish, at his best he seems as great as an old master, and then you see that it is pastiche—his originality is a kind of comedy, the comedy of outrage, and perhaps the personification of the Spanish temper.

One of the highest compliments in Spain is the dedicatory bullfight. On August 12, 1961, this honor was accorded to Dalí, in the Plaza de Toros in Figueres, “An Extraordinary Corrida to Pay Homage to the Eminent Artist Salvador Dalí.”

In his later years he supported Franco, and this alienated those friends of his who had endured his nonsensical and dotty utterances. They drew the line at fascism. Once, after a lunch with Franco, Dalí said, “I have reached the conclusion that he is a saint.” Before then he had not been particularly political—he was not yet scatterbrained enough for that. He had chosen to be oblique, and had said, apropos of “Autumn Cannibalism” (two semi-humans, feeding on each other, propped up with crutches and garnished with ants) that it showed “the pathos of the Civil War considered (by me) as a phenomenon of natural history, as opposed to Picasso who considered it a political phenomenon.”

Luis Buñuel made The Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) with Dalí; a celebrated image in the notorious fifteen-minute film is an eyeball sliced with a razor. But Buñuel eventually came to regret and finally loathe Dalí for his self-promotion and irresponsible encouragement of Franco. Buñuel had said in his memoirs that he considered surrealism “a poetic, a revolutionary, and a moral movement.”