Dallying with Dali

When we were making a list of places we wanted to see in Catalonia, the Miro Museum was tenth on my list. On one of my lists, tenth is so low that I am hoping it will drop off the list. Dali had two strikes against him: I don´t get surrealism, I am not good at Greek, Roman or Norse mythology. I hardly want to see something if I don´t have the codes or symbols to decode what I am seeing. But seeing that Bonnie and Joaquim were headed to Figueres (The Grove of Fig Trees), I slipped out to the internet to read up on Dali and so view some of the images ahead of time.

I think what was the most helpful to my viewing of Dali is that I had spent two days with Picasso and then another day with Miro. Even better, I have had Bonnie by my side in all three events and what one of us misses in a picture, the other spots right away and alludes to, usually with a point of the finger and a flicker of the eyelid. Having someone there who has been speaking the same pictorial language as you, is an added bonus in the Dali Museum, where there is so little text on the walls to help guide one´s thinking.

The curators have place images that speak to one another close to each other, sometimes side by side and sometimes across the room. The crucifixion images that were side by side in one room, though Dali had constructed a woman on a cross which I viewed with other patrons. The light on the image went off, and it stopped moving when the patrons I was viewing it with moved on, so I went in a little closer and tried to get its mechanism to work. No luck. Then I saw a small slot into which I was to put 20 centimes. There it was, the darkest of satires – see a man on a cross for free, but pay 20 centimes to see a woman. That Dali should have been excommunicated from the church in any case. The images that were across from each other were in a different room: Dali on one side of the large room, and his wife Gala, on the other wall, both of them observing the other. We sat down in this room and that is when I saw a guard with a gun in the corner. I said to Bonnie, ¨I got a close look at his belt and it is holding bullets right around his back¨ ¨Hopefully, he is part of Dali´s humour and those bullets are not real,¨ she replied.

By this time David had experienced all Dali he wanted to see, and had even laid on the rug drawing images in his own note book. David was remembering a street festival for children we had passed. There were large slides, bouncing houses and a small train running a track. Accompanying music and flashing Christmas lights made this space even more interesting than Dali for David, so Joaquim went back to the free street festival, something I am seeing often in Catalonia.
Bonnie said to me after they left, ¨I don´t think I can stand much longer.¨

¨Me,either. Museum fatigues is setting in. That weary feeling didn´t stop us from walking an hour and a half more.

That is one of the troubles with lookiing at Dali. One picture leads to another.

I couldn´t supress my laughter afer looking at one diaorma, for Dali had taken on Velasquez, just as Picasso had taken on Velasquez and there were references to Las Meninas, this time in a holograph. That little girl in the square dress, the little girl´s maid, the doorman whose silhoutte you can make out in the doorway, the couple in the picture -- all of them were referenced by Dali in a scene where men were sitting at a table drinking beer and playing cards. One of the card players even had a full house, which could also be a reference to the Velasquez painting.

The truth about the stay at my 10th favorite place to go, is that we stayed until the very last minute possible in the museum. Then we had to run back, for when I said, ¨I hope Joaquim hasn´t eaten up all of those sweet Clementimes,¨ Bonnie replied, ¨Hey, we were supposed to pick them up from the coat check room when we left.¨

Of course, having to go back to the museum and run some of its halls to find the coat check-pick up, we discovered two whole floors of the museum we had missed.

Arta