[Public Knowledge] 'Casa Dali' - Coco Capitán Apartamento (2023)

‘Dalí was always working wherever he was and any time of year, but painting, in the sense of undertaking large-scale works in oil, was something he only did in Portlligat in summer … Its true ecstasy came with the summer heat’.

Casa Dalí opens up Salvador Dalí’s home on the shores of Spain’s Costa Brava, with photos by Coco Capitán offering a rare glimpse of the artist’s surreal house and workshop. Purchased by Dalí in the early 1930s, the house served as the artist’s primary residence and workspace, the birthplace of some of his most famous paintings, including The Persistence of Memory.

A special introduction by architect Oscar Tusquets Blanca recounts his 15-year friendship with Dalí, while exclusive new photos by Coco Capitán capture the artist’s home in the same golden light that drew him to the Mediterranean village of Portlligat, where he ‘claimed that he was the first Spaniard to see the sun rise’. Coco’s photos lure readers into the grandeur of the artist’s home as a site of active creation—both of life and of art—where the worn ephemera of Dalí’s studio appear alongside images of his infamous taxidermy collection, the iconic couch modelled after Mae West’s mouth, and the distinctive white exteriors that also shaped one of our best sellers, The Modern Architecture of Cadaqués: 1955–71.

An original poem by Coco, written at the time she photographed the house, adorns the front and back covers, emblematic of her introspective approach to a practice that defies a single medium. Through these firsthand accounts, Casa Dalí grants special access to an eccentric space that stands as its own Dalinian creation, both witness and inspiration to the artist’s definitive style.