Stop and Look – Dalí with his Back turned painting Gala

The Salvador Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres is an extraordinary place – as Dalí himself fully intended it to be. It was founded in the ruins of the old Teatre Principal of his native town, Figueres in Catalonia.

As its name suggests, it’s both a gallery displaying the works of art Dalí created throughout his highly productive career and a place where his inexhaustible inventiveness continues to generate events and surprises even after his death. 

From its outer walls, crenellated with giant eggs and sprinkled with bread rolls, it’s an immensely enjoyable place to visit. There was no kind or style of art that Dalí wouldn’t — or didn’t — experiment with. At Figueres, we can see him as a master of all the “isms” of the twentieth century, including Cubism and Dadaism, the offspring of his friends Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

And not only painting: there are installations like The Face of Mae West that can be used as a Drawing-room (a 1974 three-dimensional version of a drawing of 1934-35), and a famous film, Le Chien Andalou, made with Luis Bunuel in 1929. He was a brilliant pasticheur of most historical styles too. 

Despite his iconoclastic wit and very twentieth-century inventiveness, temperamentally Dalí was more in tune with the old masters than with the moderns: he wrote an essay praising Vermeer very much at the expense of his fellow Dutchman, the pioneer abstractionist Piet Mondriaan. 

In this picture, the references to masters old and new are piled so densely that we are bewildered. First, we have to grapple with its title. In full, this runs: Dalí with his Back turned painting Gala with her Back turned eternalised in six virtual Corneas provisionally reflected in six real Mirrors. 

We’re immediately reminded of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte’s famous picture of the man looking in a mirror in which he sees the back of his own head. 

But we’re also reminded of Vermeer’s painting of an artist’s studio in which the artist is seen from the back, painting the model on a canvas set up between them. And that canvas between artist and subject, together with the reflection in the mirror, makes us think of another of Dalí’s heroes, Velázquez, and his great picture of the little Infanta surrounded by her waiting women, Las Meninas. 

A striking feature of the composition is the recession from the back of the painter’s chair, close in the foreground, and the painter’s face in the mirror, with two views of his subject — his wife and inexhaustible muse, Gala — and, in between, two views of his canvas, from front and back. Dalí wanted to stress this three-dimensionality by creating a stereoscopic version of Dalí with his Back turned painting Gala and that too is to be seen at Figueres. 

Dalí is best known as a Surrealist, a painter whose images are attempts to depict the dream-world of the unconscious or subconscious mind, which began to be an important subject of debate in the 1920s. 

His work lurches unpredictably from the erotic to the religious, from the representational to the bizarre, from the meaningful to the meaningless, and from highly original to deliberately derivative. 

But Dalí’s derivations are always provocative and bring us into confrontations we may be delighted, astonished or even shocked by. We come away from his museum at Figueres impressed, amazed and highly entertained.  

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.