I’m not sure what took me to Salvador Dalí’s house in Port Lligat, but it sure as hell wasn’t admiration. As a public figure, I hold him alone responsible for the look-at-me culture that gives contemporary art a bad name. And as a painter… don’t get me started. Sceptics slag off conceptual art as a load of navel-gazing nonsense, made by people with no interest in anything other than themselves. But to be fair to Dalí, he did at least have something to say. That is: ‘I’m mad, me!’
No, if I’m honest the only reason I’d slogged up the hill from the nearest town was nosiness. Artists’ houses that have been preserved as museums are always a thrill. They appeal to the busybody in me, but have the same high culture pull as a major art gallery. You miss out the crowds, the branding and the reverence of somewhere like the National Gallery, but get an eyeful of a famous person’s loo. Art history and scatological curiosity go hand-in-hand.
Britain has stacks of these museums. Barbara Hepworth’s place in St Ives, Cherry-burn in Northumberland, where Thomas Bewick was born and Gainsborough’s house in Suffolk are a few off the top of my head. I can’t quite face a trip to Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘avant garden’ in Lanarkshire; if it’s true that you should never meet your heroes, the same probably applies to turning up at their house after they’ve died.
In fact, I actually prefer visiting the houses of artists I don’t like. When I lived in Paris, the place I spent the most time besides work and my local bar was the Gustave Moreau museum. Moreau was a useless painter, and he knew it — Zola described his work as barely worth a shrug of the shoulders.
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