The story
Under the stage of this building lies Salvador Dalí himself. The painter, born in Figueres in 1904, chose a crypt beneath the old municipal theatre where, as a teenager, he had first shown his work in public. When he died in 1989 he was laid there, inside the museum he had designed himself.
The theatre had burned during the Spanish Civil War and stood in ruins for decades. Dalí proposed rebuilding it as his museum, the town agreed, and it opened in September 1974. He kept the horseshoe of the old auditorium as an open courtyard and set a glass geodesic dome over the stage. Outside, the red walls are crowned with giant eggs. In the courtyard stands a full-size car based on his 1938 installation Rainy Taxi, and upstairs a room becomes the face of the film star Mae West when seen from the right spot, her lips a pink sofa.
The paintings cover his whole career. Leda Atomica, from 1949, shows his wife Gala as the queen of Greek myth, with every object floating apart, a nod to the new atomic physics. Basket of Bread, from 1945, is a small, almost photographic still life. The Spectre of Sex-Appeal, from 1934, belongs to his early surrealist years. In the Masterpieces Room hang pictures by other artists from Dalí's own collection, among them a Bather by the French academic painter William Bouguereau.
The Swallow's Tail, from 1983, is here too. It is his last painting, a few curved lines taken from the mathematics of catastrophe theory, finished six years before he was buried a few metres away.
