Dalí-wood
Salvador Dalí’s Theater-Museum is the ultimate surreal experience
Just a short train ride from Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, the small town of Figueres is where the great surrealist Salvador Dalí was born and raised. In 1960, Dalí, by then a hugely successful art star and an international celebrity, began to transform a burned-out theater in Figueres into a renovated museum that would display his works and be a living embodiment of the way he saw the world. It took decades (Dalí ended up living there in his later years and dying in 1989), but the Theater-Museum today is unlike any art exhibition space in the world: every surface and space is designed to fill the visitor with the sense of whimsy, of imagination, and of dreamlike transformation.
Dalí on the 1950s TV show What’s My Line?:
Paintings and sculpture are everywhere in the Theater-Museum, by Dalí and by other artists that he loved. You can visit his crypt, his personal rooms, huge atria and many eccentric and entertaining spaces, such as the Mae West Room, which looks like a conglomeration of bizarre furniture and decoration until you look through a magnifying glass at the top of a small set of stairs and see that it’s mapped out like the face of the famous blond actress.
To cap it all off, in one small wing, visitors can view the fantastical pieces of jewelry Dalí designed, all with glistening precious stones and most with moving parts. There’s nothing quite like the (literally) beating “Royal Heart” brooch he designed that’s made of gold and rubies:
If you can’t make it to Figueres, watch this 2003 animated short, Destino, created by Walt Disney in collaboration with Dalí, who conceived much of its imagery:
