Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
years of struggle, with an exhibition in 1925. The masterpiece from this, his so-called realist
period, was
La Masia
(Farmhouse).
It was during WWII, while living in seclusion in Normandy, that Miró's definitive leit-
motifs emerged. Among the most important images that appear frequently throughout his
work are women, birds (the link between earth and the heavens), stars (the unattainable
heavenly world, the source of imagination), and a sort of net entrapping all these levels of
the cosmos. The Miró works that most people are acquainted with emerged from this time -
arrangements of lines and symbolic figures in primary colours, with shapes reduced to their
essence.
He lived in Mallorca, home of his wife Pilar Juncosa, from 1956 until his death in 1983.
The Fundació Joan Miró, housed in an extensive gallery atop Montjuïc, has the single
largest collection of Miró's work in the world today.
Salvador Dalí
The great Catalan artist Salvador Dalí i Domènech (1904-89) was born and died in
Figueres, where he left his single greatest artistic legacy, the Teatre-Museu Dalí. Although
few of his famed works reside in Barcelona, the city provided a stimulating atmosphere for
Dalí, and places like Park Güell, with its surrealist-like aspects, had a powerful effect on
him.
Prolific painter, showman, shameless self-promoter or just plain weirdo, Dalí was nothing
if not a character - probably a little too much for the conservative small-town folk of
Figueres.
Every now and then a key moment arrives that can change the course of one's life. Dalí's
came in 1929, when the French poet Paul Éluard visited Cadaqués with his Russian wife,
Gala. The rest, as they say, is histrionics. Dalí shot off to Paris to be with Gala and plunged
into the world of surrealism.
In the 1930s Salvador and Gala returned to live at Port Lligat on the north Catalan coast,
where they played host to a long list of fashionable and art-world guests until the war years
- the parties were by all accounts memorable.
They started again in Port Lligat in the 1950s. The stories of sexual romps and Gala's ap-
petite for young local boys are legendary. The 1960s saw Dalí painting pictures on a grand
scale, including his 1962 reinterpretation of Marià Fortuny's
Batalla de Tetuán
. On his
death in 1989, he was buried (according to his own wish) in the Teatre-Museu he had cre-
