Spend Surrealist Summer with Salvador Dalí

Summer is on! If you’re still looking for a beach where you can show your artsy bikini, maybe you’ll be tempted to spend the summer with Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala. Join them on their Surrealist estate at the Spanish seaside, as a photographer Charles Hewitt did in 1955. Brace yourselves for some Surrealist nudity…

How did it all start?

Salvador is kicked out of his father’s house. After a few months-long search, he finds a suitable place for his new home: a former fisherman’s shack near the secluded village of Portlligat on Spain’s Costa Brava. He writes about the difficulties of finding a new home in his biography and describes the new house to be “like a real biological structure […]. Each new pulse in our life had its own new cell, its room. […] I wanted it all good and small—the smaller the more womblike.” He buys it with the 20,000 francs that the Viscount of Noailles gives him as an advance on a commission, a painting that would become the later The Old Age of William Tell.

For years, Dalí, together with his wife and muse Gala, keeps purchasing adjacent cabins to the shack, making the house a sort of labyrinth of twisted corridors and passages filled with artworks and weird mementos.

As the Civil War breaks out in Spain, Dalí and Gala move to the United States and return to Portlligat at the end of 1948. The artist begins to work in the house again.

Summer with Salvador Dalí

Since the artist is quite a showman and loves modeling for the camera, he goes a little wild when the photographer Charles Hewitt comes to take photos of him. Charles Hewitt was a a pioneering reportage photographer who worked for Picture Post magazine, for which the photoshoot was commissioned. The images are set in the natural habitat and show the extravagant personality of Salvador Dalí. Hewitt eventually entitled the story A Day with Salvador Dalí.

They also show Salvador Dalí’s estate as a perfect place to spend the summer. The artist said about his favorite place:

Portlligat is the place of production, the ideal place for my work. Everything fits to make it so: time goes more slowly and each hour has its proper dimension. There is a geological peacefulness: it is a unique planetary case.

Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala – Salvador Dalí

After Gala’s death in 1982, he moved to the 14th century Púbol Castle. You can currently visit his house in Portlligat which has become a House-Museum.

Have a Surrealistically fun summer!