01-28-2016, 03:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-28-2016, 03:59 PM by Drunk Monk.)
So on to the Dali Museum. When we were first discussing taking a big Europe trip during the winter, Spain came up because it wasn't quite as cold as the rest. The biggest consideration for me was that I have always dreamed of visiting the Dali Museum. Dali was the most influential artist upon my rather limited career in the arts. In high school and college, I studied his works, his writings, his interviews, all that stuff. He had such impact upon my view of art.
There is a Dali Museum in Barcelona, This is not to be confused with the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres (I'll get to that later). The Figueres museum is part of the official Dali legacy under the auspices of the Salvador Dali Foundation, part of the Dalinian Triangle. The Barcelona museum, like the Dali Museum in Florida, are separate private entities. If you know Dali, this is sooooo Dali. He was part charlatan and this only feeds into the legend of the man. The Dali Museum in Barcelona is just off of the plaza of La Seu, although you can easily miss it. I walked past it several times before noticing it. It's a private collection, some 4K+ pieces we were told, housed in a narrow space in the Barrio Gotic. The bulk of it is lithographs. Now, if you know anything about Dali, you know about the Great Dali Art Fraud. In his later years, as Gala was clinging to her Castle estate and Dali's vitality was fading, they were both hungry to keep up their extravagant lifestyle and Dali did something quite forbidden - he signed blank papers. No one knows how many. So many of his later lithographs might not even be his work. They might be his understudies. It is believed he wasn't even overseeing lithographic production. So on top of being an immensely prolific artist, and having multiple versions of many of his most famous works, there are countless later lithos that may all be fakes. But who cares? That's part of the Dali legend.
The Barcelona museum doesn't even have a website. It was manned by three people, a ticket taker, one guard inside the museum, and someone at the exit gift shop, which was really just a table with some odd Dalinian items. It had a massive collection of lithos, most in the high numbers like 450/500. Beyond that, they had several sculptural studies for other works, and a lot of oddities, like Dali-designed wine bottles, lots of great photos, a Dali designed calendar. I've had so many Dali calendars - I even have one for 2016 - all slapdash collections of his major works, so it was really cool to see what he designed himself. There was Dali's work for the Olympics (a series of plates featuring several events), Dali's zodiac, Dali's deck of playing cards, his illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy and Don Quixote, so many odd items that I've never seen in any of his books. The centerpiece was a half-size diorama sculpture thing that he made for some Spanish festival, an insane Dalinian centerpiece that had life-sizes self-portrait statues, well documented in photos of its construction and design. At the end of the festival, it was ceremoniously burned to ashes. It was a wonderful little museum and I would have been totally blown away had we not continued on to do the Dalinian triangle.
After the Picasso and Dali museums, we walked to Gaudi's Le Pedrera and Casa Batllo, but they were swamped with tourists and really expensive (20+ €, which makes it like $70+ for all three of us to get in) so we just looked at the outside facade, stumbled through the gift shop, and moved on. I was more impressed by the building next to Casa Batllo, which was of extraordinary architecture and also charged for tours (surely to get overflow from Batllo). It must have sucked to have designed such an architectural wonder only to be upstaged by Gaudi next door. We went back to a cafe near La Seu, and marveled at the sunset playing out over that gothic architectural masterpiece.
The next day, we had tickets for Sagrada Familia, which we paid extra for at a tourist office because the damn app wouldn't work. We were scheduled to be the first tour group allowed in.
There is a Dali Museum in Barcelona, This is not to be confused with the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres (I'll get to that later). The Figueres museum is part of the official Dali legacy under the auspices of the Salvador Dali Foundation, part of the Dalinian Triangle. The Barcelona museum, like the Dali Museum in Florida, are separate private entities. If you know Dali, this is sooooo Dali. He was part charlatan and this only feeds into the legend of the man. The Dali Museum in Barcelona is just off of the plaza of La Seu, although you can easily miss it. I walked past it several times before noticing it. It's a private collection, some 4K+ pieces we were told, housed in a narrow space in the Barrio Gotic. The bulk of it is lithographs. Now, if you know anything about Dali, you know about the Great Dali Art Fraud. In his later years, as Gala was clinging to her Castle estate and Dali's vitality was fading, they were both hungry to keep up their extravagant lifestyle and Dali did something quite forbidden - he signed blank papers. No one knows how many. So many of his later lithographs might not even be his work. They might be his understudies. It is believed he wasn't even overseeing lithographic production. So on top of being an immensely prolific artist, and having multiple versions of many of his most famous works, there are countless later lithos that may all be fakes. But who cares? That's part of the Dali legend.
The Barcelona museum doesn't even have a website. It was manned by three people, a ticket taker, one guard inside the museum, and someone at the exit gift shop, which was really just a table with some odd Dalinian items. It had a massive collection of lithos, most in the high numbers like 450/500. Beyond that, they had several sculptural studies for other works, and a lot of oddities, like Dali-designed wine bottles, lots of great photos, a Dali designed calendar. I've had so many Dali calendars - I even have one for 2016 - all slapdash collections of his major works, so it was really cool to see what he designed himself. There was Dali's work for the Olympics (a series of plates featuring several events), Dali's zodiac, Dali's deck of playing cards, his illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy and Don Quixote, so many odd items that I've never seen in any of his books. The centerpiece was a half-size diorama sculpture thing that he made for some Spanish festival, an insane Dalinian centerpiece that had life-sizes self-portrait statues, well documented in photos of its construction and design. At the end of the festival, it was ceremoniously burned to ashes. It was a wonderful little museum and I would have been totally blown away had we not continued on to do the Dalinian triangle.
After the Picasso and Dali museums, we walked to Gaudi's Le Pedrera and Casa Batllo, but they were swamped with tourists and really expensive (20+ €, which makes it like $70+ for all three of us to get in) so we just looked at the outside facade, stumbled through the gift shop, and moved on. I was more impressed by the building next to Casa Batllo, which was of extraordinary architecture and also charged for tours (surely to get overflow from Batllo). It must have sucked to have designed such an architectural wonder only to be upstaged by Gaudi next door. We went back to a cafe near La Seu, and marveled at the sunset playing out over that gothic architectural masterpiece.
The next day, we had tickets for Sagrada Familia, which we paid extra for at a tourist office because the damn app wouldn't work. We were scheduled to be the first tour group allowed in.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse