Cadaques and ‘The Persistence of Memory’ Along Spain’s Costa Brava
The colorful seaside resort of Cadaqués bears little relation these days to the rundown backwater fishing village with which Dalí fell in love during his childhood vacations before World War I. Today, expensive whitewashed homes cozy up to neat esplanades. The carefully preserved swimming coves share no hint of the grit and shingle strand from which Cadaqués’s fishermen launched their boats in former times to pursue sardines, the precious commodity that kept this economy fueled.
Cadaqués is a town in the Alt Empordà, in the province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. On a bay in the middle of the Cap de Creus peninsula, near Cap de Creus cape, it juts from the Costa Brava (“wild coast”) into the Mediterranean. Cadaqués has a special place in art history. Salvador Dalí often visited Cadaqués in his childhood, and later kept a home in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town. A summer holiday here in 1916 was pivotal to Dalí’s artistic career overall and in the production of two of his most famous pieces, The Persistence of Memory and The Spectre of Sex Appeal. Other notable artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Federico Garcia Lorca, and John Cage, among others, also spent time here. The shores around Cadaqués and Portlligat, which inspired Dalí, have very little in common with those further south, where jet-skis and the beach bars lure tourists.
Cadaqués’ northern wind, the tramuntana, is the plot device in the short story, Tramontana, by Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winner for literature. The placid blue seas of summertime become a very different environment when the local wind, the tramuntana or mistral (in France), howls down from snow-clad summits of the Pyrenees and provokes the Mediterranean into rages. The tramuntana is thought to affect the emotions as brutally as it does the sea and countryside, and is a constant topic of conversation in this region. The Empordanese are known for their intransigence (the Dalis were no exception). One writer attributes this regional trait to having to push constantly against the wind. Anyone mentally fragile, or with a tendency to sudden flare ups, is likely to be labeled atramuntanat (touched by the tramuntana). Crimes of passion committed when the wind is raging were historically half-way forgiven. It is alleged that the tramuntana is responsible for depression and suicide, especially in Cadaques. The protagonist of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, `Tramuntana’, is such a victim.
If you leave the beachside during peak seasons of calm and warmth and wander off into the rugged terrain surrounding the village, it does not take long to see what a profound influence this strange landscape might exert on Dalí’s fanciful sensibilities. He was strongly drawn to the texture of local rocks and their juxtaposition with the surrounding sea in all of its moods. These contrasts feature both in his early, realistic work, and in the paintings of his Surrealist phase. In the painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), the passive, ochre cliffs of Cadaques dominate the right-hand side of the canvas, while the inert sea barely has enough energy to lap the base of these cliffs, adding to the sense of decay and dissolution that pervades the piece. (See the comparison of the painting and cliff photo in gallery below). Dalí uses these compelling cliffs and coves to symbolize his traumatic perceptions of the Cap de Creus as a child. These images integrate the painting and convey conflicting dynamic of fear and affection about this area near the sea.
A sensitivity to these natural surroundings is even more striking in The Spectre of Sex Appeal (1934), in which the child Dalí, clad in sailor suit, stands overwhelmed by his first sight of female family members swimming and sporting their far-from-size-four figures in the ill-fitting bathing gear of the period. The same cliffs are prominent in the background of this painting and can be seen in the photo gallery, below, along with today’s more slender version of a Cadaques bather. At such times it is exhilarating to stand beneath the cliffs of Cap de Creus and watch, as Dalí did, the swells crashing against them, while flocks of seabirds — gannets, gulls and shearwaters — dive and soar in sheer excitement on the gales. Dalí was strongly drawn to the architecture of these rocks, as were we by the narrow streets carved from the promontories that line the Cadaques coast.
Besides the blinding white buildings with colorful trim, often imitating the deep blue of sea and sky, we noticed the use of green Majolica, a lustrously glazed earthenware as exterior treatments on gutters, patios, trim. This colorful enamel was probably introduced into Spain from Persia through Arabia. The tableware was produced on the island of Majorca as early as, if not before, 1235, and was largely exported into Italy, where it was called Maiolica ware, Maiolica being the old pronunciation of Majorca. Majolica is created with a tin glazing that creates a brilliant white, opaque surface for subsequent painting. During the 14th century, the limited palette of colors was expanded from the traditional manganese purple and copper green to include cobalt blue, antimony yellow and iron-oxide orange. In Texas, we collect Majolica as precious decorative items, but our hailstorms do not allow its use an exterior architectural detail! We stumbled on a 17th century Baroque Church, Santa Maria, whose gilded interior altars contrast dramatically with its surrounding streets of jagged natural rock.
There are many seaside resort areas along the Costa Brava. Many are filled with sunning (topless) locals and tourists from cruises. But, for us, none of them enchant as completely as Cadaques because of its remoteness and artistic legacy. In the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” We cannot help but think that this place altered Dali’s thought about his memories…and we are grateful that Cadaques etched itself so indelibly in his sub-conscious. We will share more about this enigmatic artist, his life, and the museum/temple he created in Figueres, in a later blog. (Photography credit: Stephanie and Steve Chambers).
