log in
Enter site
Login to use Arthive functionality to the maximum
Madonna of Port Lligat
Salvador Dali • Painting, 1950, 275×209 cm
Description of the artwork «Madonna of Port Lligat»
Port Lligat is a place that gave Salvador Dali strength and seemed to nourish vital energy. Wherever he went, being already famous, public, media, scandalous, with the first real sunny days he returned to Port Lligat every year and left with the onset of autumn cold. Dali lived in Port Lligat for more than 50 years and left him for a long time only once - during the Second World War. For the whole 8 years that he spent in America.
In 1930, when Salvador Dali and Gala bought a house here at the very beginning of the relationship, it was not even a house. A 4 by 4 meter fishing hut, which until now had not even been lived in, but dried in nets, and an attached shed, which would later house a kitchen and toilet. After 2 years they will buy a hut in the neighborhood, after another 3 they will build a tall house in their place. The construction here never ended: a library, a spacious workshop, an oval hall, a dining room, a pool and a paved road appeared one after another.
“Port Ligat for me is a symbol of asceticism and solitude. It was here that I learned how to manage small things, to direct and hone my thought so that it becomes smashing like a sword. ”- wrote Dali.
First option“Port Madonna of Lligat,” he writes immediately upon his return from America, a year later another one - this one. He packs it - and goes to the Pope with this gift in the hope of obtaining permission to marry Gala (they were already married, but the wedding was still impossible due to the fact that Gala's first husband lived and lived). Upon returning from America, Dali is obsessed with two new passions - Catholicism and physics. Quantum physics, atom fission, antimatter - he not only read in a popular magazine about new scientific discoveries, he methodically and deeply understands them for many years. Strange as it may seem, these discoveries do not contradict his mysticism, but, on the contrary, nourish and expand its borders. Dali biographer Michelle Nuridsani claims that the artist even stopped drinking to keep his mind sharp, to keep his mind from relaxing for a minute. And being in a state of constant mental arousal, to master and digest the power, the volume of new knowledge. Feel the world disassembled into particles and the effort of imagination to assemble it into visible images. And "Madonna" is becoming one of several paintings that open this "atomic period".
The latest scientific discoveries allow Dali to technically return to classical painting: to paint the Madonna in a traditional pose and endow it with the features of the Gala, restore recognizability and even realism to objects, apply a classic triangular composition. Carefully register the drapery on Madonna's skirt, and then make a lulling hole with a cosmic landscape in her chest, make the waves beat against her ribs. And hang it all up in the air, turn off gravity and make nothing touch nothing.
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
In 1930, when Salvador Dali and Gala bought a house here at the very beginning of the relationship, it was not even a house. A 4 by 4 meter fishing hut, which until now had not even been lived in, but dried in nets, and an attached shed, which would later house a kitchen and toilet. After 2 years they will buy a hut in the neighborhood, after another 3 they will build a tall house in their place. The construction here never ended: a library, a spacious workshop, an oval hall, a dining room, a pool and a paved road appeared one after another.
“Port Ligat for me is a symbol of asceticism and solitude. It was here that I learned how to manage small things, to direct and hone my thought so that it becomes smashing like a sword. ”- wrote Dali.
First option“Port Madonna of Lligat,” he writes immediately upon his return from America, a year later another one - this one. He packs it - and goes to the Pope with this gift in the hope of obtaining permission to marry Gala (they were already married, but the wedding was still impossible due to the fact that Gala's first husband lived and lived). Upon returning from America, Dali is obsessed with two new passions - Catholicism and physics. Quantum physics, atom fission, antimatter - he not only read in a popular magazine about new scientific discoveries, he methodically and deeply understands them for many years. Strange as it may seem, these discoveries do not contradict his mysticism, but, on the contrary, nourish and expand its borders. Dali biographer Michelle Nuridsani claims that the artist even stopped drinking to keep his mind sharp, to keep his mind from relaxing for a minute. And being in a state of constant mental arousal, to master and digest the power, the volume of new knowledge. Feel the world disassembled into particles and the effort of imagination to assemble it into visible images. And "Madonna" is becoming one of several paintings that open this "atomic period".
The latest scientific discoveries allow Dali to technically return to classical painting: to paint the Madonna in a traditional pose and endow it with the features of the Gala, restore recognizability and even realism to objects, apply a classic triangular composition. Carefully register the drapery on Madonna's skirt, and then make a lulling hole with a cosmic landscape in her chest, make the waves beat against her ribs. And hang it all up in the air, turn off gravity and make nothing touch nothing.
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
