The house where it all began

That the framed photograph of his dead brother haunted Salvador Dalí every time he entered his parents’ bedroom and saw it on the bedside table was a childhood fear we know about from Dalí’s own writings. Yet it is only now that we have the chance to relive the experience of walking into the bedroom of the notary Salvador Dalí i Cufí and his wife Felipa Domènech to discover for ourselves the oval portrait of that baby with the melancholy gaze.

This is a key function of house museums, which evoke the lives of the people who lived there, turning us into witnesses to the memories of others. The possessions and objects, the furniture, the photographs, the way the rooms are arranged and their ambience combine to help transport us back in time.

The house at number 20 Carrer Monturiol in Figueres (today, number 6) where Salvador Dalí was born at 8.45 on the evening of May 11, 1904, as he records with obsessive precision in his autobiography, has been transformed into the Casa Natal Dalí museum. The three-storey property was inhabited until relatively recently and was therefore in acceptable condition, although there was no longer any trace of the Dalí family. They left the home where Dalí’s father also had his office when the artist was eight years old to move to the nearby Plaça de la Palmera.

Of the building that was Dalí’s birthplace, the facade and the splendid rooftop terrace that overlooked the garden of the Marquise de la Torre are two architectural features to have survived. As have the ceramic floor tiles with the floral designs that were so much to the taste of the bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century. The kitchen too remains, all made of stone, including its stone sink. The original layout of the home has been altered on more than one occasion to suit the needs of successive tenants, and as the original furniture from Dalí’s first home has not survived it had to be recreated or replaced with pieces dating from the same era.

Yet the alterations made to the house and the lack of some original features does not mean the museum fails to live up to expectations. The director of the Museum of the Empordà in Figueres and also the Casa Natal, Eduard Bech, points out: “No artworks are exhibited here, but their contents are explained,” especially those that shed light on Dalí’s relationship with Figueres and the Empordà region, a link, adds Bech, “ that has not been reflected in any museum in the world”.

Gemma Adell, one of those responsible for the museum’s presentation, emphasises the sensory experience and the idea that “it’s not a visit to a place but to a life over time”. This purpose is made clear in the first room, where we see the hologram of Dalí’s notary father taking possession of his new office and writing to his fiancee about their upcoming marriage. This scene recreates the environment that nourished the artist’s early years and begins a journey that goes from an intimate, private life made up women (maids, cooks, nannies, aunts, grandmothers, a mother and a sister) beneath the shadow of the father to Dalí’s emergence as a public figure like no other creator before him.

It has taken three decades to get to this point. In 1995, the Figueres City Council bought the building’s ground floor with a view to preserving the property that represented Dalí’s first link with the city. Other successive acquisitions had to take place until the entire building was owned by the municipality and restoration work could begin. In 2006, the first plan for the museum project was drawn up under Anna Capella, then director of the Museum of the Empordà, and Josep Playà, journalist and expert on Dalí’s work. However, that first draft was put on hold due to the 2008 financial crisis, and as the years went by a new plan became necessary, which was developed by the architectural team of Dani Freixas and executed by the Tururut company, specialists in audiovisual and multimedia productions.

Those dubious about immersive experiences, fearing a tendency to transform art into pure show, can rest assured that the experience provided by the Casa Natal Dalí is immersive but not intrusive. Everything that has been preserved is treated with respect, while the rest is presented with narrative clarity and a diversity of resources, including holograms, kaleidoscopic projections and automatic hidden doors that invite you to move from one space to another. A key feature are the audio guides without which, Bech says, “it would be like watching a documentary with the sound off”.

The first floor immerses the visitor in the intimate world of Dali’s family and their close relationships within the intellectual community of Figueres, such as Joan Subias, who lived on the second floor, or the exotic Mates family on the third floor who were wealthy and who had lived in Buenos Aires. Also in their sphere was the writer and politician Josep Puig Pujades and Jaume Miravitlles, who would become the Republic’s propaganda minister during the Civil War. This part of the visit is particularly evocative, “a pantry of memories”, as Bech calls it, with the stained glass windows suddenly transforming into screens showing Dalí’s artworks that were shaped by this private universe, such as the portraits of his nanny Llúcia and of Aunt Catalina, of his sister, of the father, whom he both admired and feared.

On the second floor, the narrator tells us that “we will enter Dalí’s mind”, and goes on to explain how his early pathological shyness was overcome thanks to his relationships with Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca and, above all, with the irruption of Gala and the surrealist group in his life. We also learn that from 1927 he began to grow his famous moustache that would reach a length of 25 centimetres. Here, lasers and neon lights turn the old rooms into a map of symbols tracing the passion of the young Dalí for psychoanalysis, relativity theory and the fourth dimension: “Science is my only reading,” he said. It is also where Dalí’s American experience is recounted, his contact with Andy Warhol and Hollywood and his emergence as a publicity-loving showman who courted the international media.

Genius or not, the depths of Dalí’s contribution to the artistic imaginings of the Empordà region is covered on the third floor. A visual explosion of immersive technologies transform the floor into a symphony of landscapes in motion, from Portlligat Bay and the Cap de Creus headland to the Empordà plain that inspired much of his work.

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