adventures of an american housewife in the south of france

Exploring The Dalí Theatre-Museum

After our strange night in Roses, Marq, Dawn, Michael and I headed to the Dalí Theatre-Musuem in Figueres.  Salvador Dalí has long been one of my favorite artists.  In fact, 10 years ago, I went to The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida while on Spring Break (nerd!  Who goes to an art museum on college Spring Break?  Me, that's who) and I've been hooked ever since.  Since the Dalí Theatre-Musuem is only about 2 hours from Montpellier, it's been on my list of places to visit since we moved here.

outside the museum

outside the museum

central courtyard. reminds me of the Oscar statue :)

inside the dome

hey lady

There are several Dalí museums and exhibits throughout the world, but I found this one to be particularly interesting for a few reasons.  First of all, Dalí himself collaborated with architects and curators to design and build the museum, it contains the largest span of his work (from his early sketches to some of the last works of his life), and it's where he is actually buried.  The inception and history of the museum is quite fascinating and you can read more about it here.

Dalí's crypt

Wandering through the museum, we were all in awe of the sheer volume of pieces he created during his life.  I mean, he must have really been cranking 'em out.   There are over a thousand pieces:  sculptures, large scale paintings, jewelry, and installations - just in this museum alone.  The other thing that really struck us during our visit is that Dalí seemingly could have been about 10 different artists.  He dabbled in almost every style that emerged during his career and really seemed to excel in all of them.  When most people think of Dalí, they think of his surrealist clocks and strange holographic images, but he also experimented with Cubism, Impressionism and Futurism.  You can tell that when he got bored with one technique, he moved onto another one.  His range was truly astounding.

But of course there's always his super weird stuff too.

The one disappointment I had with the museum is that there is no audio guide or any sort of pamphlet/commentary that provided information about Dalí's life or career.  I would have loved to learn some new stories about Dalí, his thought process behind some of the pieces, or where he was at in his life when the works were completed.  We all sort of wondered if maybe, because Dalí was heavily involved with the creation of this museum, he didn't want that information to be included.  Guess I'll have to do my research on my own time.

the many signatures of Dali

3 Responses to “Exploring The Dalí Theatre-Museum”

  1. Dawn says:

    Well written Natalie. I loved visiting this museum with you. I will never forget this experience. Dali has left a great impression on me.

    • ok, I installed it, here’s what I did:First I unzipped it (just double-clicked on it)Then I opened a shell (Terminal)Then I cd’d in my shell (terminal) window until I was in the directory:o cd Desktopo cd PySerial-2.6Now I’m where I need to be.Now I typed sudo su (that logs this shell window in as the root account), and it asked me for my password. I’m guessing this step of doing the install as root is probably what’s missing in your case.OSX then gave me a new prompt, and I enteredpython setup.py install…and the install indicated it completed ok.Then I typed exitLet me know if that works.

    • http://www./ says:

      Great insight! That’s the answer we’ve been looking for.

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