Maybe it's just one of those days when you're not feeling particularly imaginative, and you'd like to jolt the whimsical aspects of your nature into complete aliveness. Click on: www.salvador-dali.org and your gray day will suddenly morph into technicolor brilliance! You have just entered the magical and bizarre world of the Salvador Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain.
Salvador Dali was a multi-talented painter-sculptor-author-photographer-fashion designer. He was born about three blocks from the Theatre-Museum, in his homeland of Catalonia, near Barcelona, in 1904. Dali actually lived in the Museum for the last few years of his life; his crypt is under the geodesic dome there.
Dali created his museum in the early 1970s, on the site of the 19th-century Municipal Theatre, which was burned down by Franco's troops at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Dali was one of the most prominent surrealistic painters of his time, and the museum he designed has been called, in fact, the largest surrealistic object in the world.
When you see its red brick exterior, with gigantic eggs placed around the roof (the egg symbolizes hope and love), and the 1,500 yellow ceramic loaves of Catalan bread that have been inserted at precise intervals in the wall (the bread symbolizes the life cycle), plus the fantastic huge Oscar-style golden figurines that stand in amongst the eggs, and the occasional gigantic keyhole that appears in the wall for no discernible reason --well, you just know that you have fallen under the spell of a bizarre and eccentric artist.
Nearly 900,000 visitors trekked to the town of Figueres last year to visit the Dali Museum. If it's not possible for you to travel to Spain in the near future, an online trip to the Museum will suffice to get that imagination of yours sparking. What kind of mind did Dali have, to create the Mae West Room, complete with a Mae West Couch in the shape of the movie star's lips? What about the montage in the central courtyard of the Museum, Rainy Cadillac? The car is filled with plants and small figures, and for a euro, you can watch as it rains -- inside the Caddy. There's a chandelier made of two evening gowns, rooms devoted to Dali's fascination with holography and optical illusion, and the gorgeous, intricate collection called Jewels of Dali.
I associate Dali with his outrageous handlebar mustache, the long cape and walking stick he always wore, his haughty expression, and the way he looked right into the camera lens, close-up. The man was brilliant, versatile, working on not only his own creations, but movie dream sequences (for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound) and imaginative scenes for a Disney cartoon called Destino. Allow Dali's wild, creative flights of fancy to inspire you, and let your own imagination soar into the stratosphere!
- Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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