On Friday Julie and I went to Figueres with the sole purpose of visiting the Dalí Theatre and Museum.
I was infatuated by Dalí in my late teens, when my teacher of Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics at Moscow State Circus School – a surreal context on itself – brought an album of Dalí’s artworks to class. In the country of socialist realism, surrealism wasn’t welcomed, so seeing Dalí’s reproductions was a revelation to me. With time I visited a few museums displaying his paintings, but the Dalí Theatre and Museum holds the largest collection of Dalí’s work in one place.
By now my interest in him has waned; it was Julie’s idea to go there.
Even though I have seen quite a few of his works (though not as many as Picasso’s, whose chefs-d’œuvres hang on the walls of practically every museum) I was still amazed by his surreal ability to see and portray things under a completely unusual angle. For a guy who famously proclaimed: “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”, his works are surprisingly trippy.
We enjoyed the museum but I would not advise to go all the way to Figueres just to visit it, unless you are a hardcore Dalí fan: there’s nothing else to see in town and if you factor in the train tickets and lunch, it becomes a very expensive couple of hours.
This period in numbers:
21 km – distance cycled
1500 – paintings produced by Dali over the course of his illustrious career