The Dalí Theatre-Museum: 50 years of the Surrealist’s last great artwork

In the early 1970s, Salvador Dalí was feverishly occupied by what many regard as his last great artwork. This was no painting, sculpture or film. It was a museum in his own name, set to open at the heart of his home town, Figueres, in the Catalonia region of north-east Spain.

Dalí took complete charge of the design, the layout and the choice of exhibits — such that the resulting venue was a Dalinian Gesamtkunstwerk. ‘Other worlds exist,’ he said with typical hyperbole, ‘but these other worlds reside… precisely at the centre of the dome of the Dalí Museum.’

The dome to which he was referring is the huge glass geodesic one that crowns the building he brought into being. The Dalí Theatre-Museum opened on 28 September 1974 and has been wowing visitors ever since. Few will forget the Burgundy-red exterior walls, dotted with sculptures of geometrically arranged bread rolls and topped by sculptures of giant eggs.

Inside, the works include Rainy Taxi (a Cadillac whose mannequin driver and passenger experience an in-car downpour) and Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used as an Apartment (a trompe-l’oeil room in which two paintings, two fireplaces and a sofa form the face of the eponymous film star).

Some 35 million people have visited the museum — not bad, given that the population of Figueres is just 48,000. In the company of other luminaries, the King of Spain recently oversaw a ceremony marking the museum’s 50th anniversary.

‘The artist himself may no longer physically be with us,’ says Fèlix Roca, general director of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation. ‘However, his impact is still felt — certainly if you judge by the crowds that have visited the museum for five decades.’

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is a non-profit, private body that was created by Dalí in 1983 to promote his art and legacy. He presided over it himself until his death six years later, aged 84.

A large part of the foundation’s remit is to manage three museum sites, all of them in Empordà, the artist’s native area of Catalonia. These are the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres; Salvador Dalí House in the coastal hamlet of Portlligat (the artist’s long-time home); and Gala Dalí Castle in the town of Púbol (an erstwhile castle that the artist’s wife Gala kept as a private residence). As per Dalí’s wishes, the second and third of these were posthumously converted into museums by the foundation in the 1990s.

‘Dalí was fascinated by immortality and the afterlife,’ says Roca. ‘He spoke of wanting to be eternal. One way to do that was through his art, but one step further was to set up a foundation to categorise that art and put it all in order.’

Roca is calling attention here to another crucial area of the foundation’s activity: the creation (initially) and periodic update (currently) of a catalogue raisonné of Dalí’s paintings. Parallel to that, the foundation’s team of experts also authenticate all works attributed to the artist.

To coincide with the Dalí Theatre-Museum’s anniversary, a small display has opened there featuring photographs of its construction. However, because of limited space — with the permanent collection predominant — large temporary exhibitions tend to be held elsewhere. The foundation has thus been involved in staging a plethora of Dalí shows over the years at the world’s biggest museums, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Tate Modern in London.

‘Like Dalí himself, we have local roots and international reach simultaneously,’ Roca says.

The artist was born into a well-to-do family in Figueres in 1904. His father was a notary, who owned a second home in Cadaqués, a Costa Brava village (very near Portlligat) where the family spent summers.

Figueres was a cosmopolitan place, just 16 miles from the French border and 80 miles from Barcelona. It boasted the first public (i.e. non-Catholic) school in Spain, which young Salvador attended and where lessons were taught in French.

As an adult, Dalí said that ‘at the age of six I wanted to be a chef. At seven, I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.’

Over the course of his life, the artist spent significant spells of time abroad, including one in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, when he became a star of the Surrealist movement; and another in the US in the 1940s, where he and Gala moved to escape the Second World War.

He always remained greatly attached to Empordà, however, and chose to spend most of the second half of his life there. When the mayor of Figueres asked Dalí if he would be so generous as to donate an artwork to his home town, the artist replied that he could do better than that — and gave it a whole museum.

As a venue, the artist chose the town’s erstwhile Municipal Theatre. Originally built in 1850, it had been left in ruins by bomb damage during the Spanish Civil War and needed drastic reconstruction. It had sentimental value to Dalí, however, having been the spot of his very first art exhibition (a group show held when he was 14).

‘To enter the Dalí Theatre-Museum is to take a journey inside the artist’s brain,’ says Roca. It’s a chaotic funhouse where vistas regularly seem designed to trick the brain and the eye. A large painting of Gala looking at the sea, for example, from a certain distance metamorphoses into a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

Roca estimates that three-quarters of what visitors encounter today is how Dalí left it. Perhaps the most notable addition this century was the opening of an annex building in 2001 to showcase many of the jewels that the artist designed. In this context, it’s worth mentioning, too, the crypt where the artist is buried: strangely modest compared with the rest of the museum, it’s located beneath the old theatre stage and is accessible to visitors.

As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations, a painting by Dalí called The Birth of Liquid Anguish was also unveiled at the museum. Created in 1932, this dreamlike landscape was acquired by the foundation at Christie’s for £1,976,000 in March 2024. (At the time of its purchase, Montse Aguer, the director of the three Dalí museums, said she was ‘filled with pride’, as the work dates to a period of Surrealist activity — in and around the early 1930s — which she deems ‘a cornerstone of the artist’s career’.)

‘Financial independence for us is absolutely key,’ says Roca, ‘as that, in turn, guarantees creative independence for everything we wish to do.’

Unlike most Spanish museums, the three run by the foundation receive no public money. They are entirely self-funded. Around 80 per cent of the foundation’s revenue comes from ticket sales, and around 20 per cent from image rights, the publication of books, and the licensing of reproductions of Dalí’s art.

After an uncomfortable couple of years during the Covid-19 pandemic, the foundation made a profit of €7.3 million (about $7.7 million) in 2023, the best year’s result in its history.

Strong visitor numbers at the three museums — almost one million people in total — help explain this. (More than 726,000 passed through the doors of the Dalí Theatre-Museum alone, making it the seventh most popular art museum in Spain.)

The foundation has also benefitted financially from supporting no fewer than five ‘immersive exhibitions’ of Dalí’s work that have toured worldwide in recent years. These entail his imagery being digitally reproduced and projected in 360-degree fashion on a venue’s walls, ceiling and floor.

‘As a foundation, we don’t want to lose our essence,’ Roca says, ‘but we also recognise the need to look forward.’

The exhibitions in question include Dalí Challenge, which recently closed in São Paulo, Brazil, and opens soon in Mexico City; Dalí, the endless enigma, a hit last year in Tokyo and Seoul; and Dalí: Cybernetics, which includes a virtual-reality element where visitors don a headset and enter a Dalinian metaverse featuring planets that turn into jellyfish and walls that crumble and rebuild.

Critics argue that such offerings are second-rate, because they don’t feature original artworks. Roca disagrees.

‘These exhibitions are another way of presenting Dalí to the world,’ he says, ‘and that’s a core part of the foundation’s remit. We’re taking him to people in faraway places who might not be able to come to Spain to encounter his work.

‘Also, the immersive experiences reach a different age group than we otherwise would: young people, roughly in their twenties, who are perhaps not so accustomed to visiting museums but who are accustomed to this type of digital experience.’

The foundation manages a collection of 4,000 works, which is enlarged every so often by acquisitions such as The Birth of Liquid Anguish, when a particularly impressive piece comes along. As a Dalí holding, it’s the largest in the world, and only really rivalled by that of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (the childless Dalí having bequeathed to the Spanish state most of the works in his possession at his death).

Roca, who joined the foundation in 2020, reports to a board of 21 trustees. He is ‘delighted’ by last year’s economic results, and there is every likelihood that, with the buzz around the Dalí Theatre-Museum anniversary, this year’s visitor numbers will be higher still.

‘One of the best things about the foundation is that we invest all profit back into our activities,’ says Roca. Reportedly, this includes the acquisition of a neighbouring building to increase the museum’s size, though details of this are yet to be announced.

Dalí’s popularity shows no sign of abating either. His hallucinatory artworks seem to appeal equally to each new generation — as does his carefully constructed persona as a madcap artist-celebrity who oozed a sense of fun and his own genius.

‘Every morning when I wake up,’ he once said, ‘I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí.’

For further details on the Dalí Theatre-Museum, including ticket information, click here