In Focus - Discover Spain: Experience the Best of Spain - page 599

and wood carvings of Africa, and from there it was a small step to the cubist style
(which involved taking objects apart and analysing their shapes), which he pion-
eered. By the mid-1920s he was even dabbling in surrealism. His most famous
painting is Guernica and Picasso consistently cranked out paintings, sculptures,
ceramics and etchings until the day he died.
Picasso's Guernica
In the first year of the Civil War, Picasso was commissioned by the Republican govern-
ment of Madrid to do the painting for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1937. As news
filtered out about the bombing of Gernika (Guernica) on 26 April 1937 in the Basque
Country by Hitler's Legión Condor, at the request of Franco (almost 2000 people died in
the attack), Picasso committed his anger to canvas; it was a poignant memorial to the first
use of airborne military hardware to devastating effect. You can see Guernica in Madrid's
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Salvador Dalí
Vying with Pablo Picasso for the title of Spain's most original artist is Salvador Dalí.
He did spend time in Madrid, where he decided that the eminent professors of Mad-
rid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando were not fit to judge him, and
thereafter spent four years romping through the city with poet Federico García
Lorca and future film director Luis Buñuel. All that remains in the capital are 20 of
his hallucinatory works in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
But Dalí belongs above all to Catalonia. He was born in Figueres, home now to
the Teatre-Museu Dalí, which is one of Spain's most memorable museums thanks
to its elevation of art to a form of theatre, which seems such an apt legacy for such
a charismatic figure. Dalí spent much of his adult life in Port Lligat, near Cadaques
and left his mark on the Castell de Púbol, near Girona; this astonishing former man-
sion is a suitably otherworldly monument to Dalí's wife, Gala.
Preoccupied with Picasso's fame, Dalí built himself a reputation as an outrageous
showman and shameless self-promoter. Dalí was a larger-than-life figure, but he
was also unrelentingly brilliant. He started off by dabbling in cubism, but became
more readily identified with the surrealists. His 'hand-painted dream photographs',
as he called them, are virtuoso executions brimming with fine detail and nightmare