Salvador Dali and his muse: who is the woman whose love became the main goal of the painter? | Culture

In the book “Salvador Dalí and Gala” by the German writer and translator Herbert Genzmer, readers can read stories regarding the famous painter who fell head over heels in love with the woman who introduced Dalí to the Parisian avant-garde scene, the nomadic lifestyle and became his main manager and critic.

In her life, Gala played many roles. For some, she is a lack of talent, for others, a vampire who kills men, for Dalí himself, she is a woman who embodies the vision of absolute freedom. But what was their love story really like? And what if she’s just another carefully stylized Dalí creation?

G. Kavaliauskaitė’s photo

We invite you to read excerpts from the book.

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“A stunning woman has arrived!” and “No matter what in the world, she will have to be mine!”

Well, Gala doesn’t really sympathize with him at first and doesn’t hide it. However, Dali is not afraid of this, because he, glowing because of the success he experienced in Paris, decides to introduce himself to her in an original way – he definitely needs her. In order to find out how to win the heart of that woman, he tries all kinds of dressing options. At first, he grabs his sister Ana Maria’s earrings, but throws them away because they will interfere with swimming. She puts on a pearl necklace, combs her hair and picks up a bunch of paint brushes. He pulls out his best silk shirt, cuts off the bottom, pulls it up – it barely reaches his navel – and begins to rip. With one tear, he exposes the shoulder, with another, the hair on the right side of the chest, with another, the left nipple, and then removes the collar. Underpants are worn backwards. He also shaves his armpits, dilutes the blue paint, smears it on the newly shaved areas, shaves them once more, following the paint mixes with blood, smears blood on his fingers, runs the mass over his knees, cannot resist the temptation to flick the razor on one knee – and the picture is finished. Blood flows, and a bright red beak ring is tucked behind the ears. The finishing touch is for the sense of smell: he heats liquid glue, puts goat manure in it, and smears the mortar all over his body from head to toe – to imitate the smell of a Faun. With this, as it seems to him, properly arranged, he goes out to the balcony and stares at Gala, who is standing below. And he sees the dream of his youth, which then became reality in a fantastic way – with flesh and blood. When Dali rushes down the stairs to greet her, he once more has a fit of convulsive laughter, which has caused him to suffer a lot. Gala looks at him and is not impressed at all. The attack is getting worse.

Dali explains: “My laughter surprised everyone, and the surprise that I saw on other people’s faces every time I got inspired only intensified the attacks. There were times when everyone would sit down on the beach to enjoy the coolness of the followingnoon and immerse themselves in philosophical reflections, and I also wanted to insert something. But I was regarding to open my mouth, as if an explosion destroyed my laughter. Finally I stopped talking altogether because instead of saying anything, I might only laugh. My Surrealist friends accepted these laughs as an unpleasant fate: they looked upon it as one of the inconveniences of dealing with a genius such as I undoubtedly was…”

Salvador Dali

The Gauls are not impressed by the laughter, and the other visitors to Kadakes seem rather to enjoy it, but in no way disturb it. They may even doubt whether there is an expression of a deeper understanding of world events.

Meanwhile, guests view Dali’s recently completed painting Black Game, which features excrement. The friends ask each other whether Dali’s attention to excrement and his scatological fantasies do not sometimes have artistic significance? However, everyone is outraged and shocked by such a realistic depiction. In the end, that picture disgusts her, she explains to Dali that such things make her vomit and are incompatible with her life.

– This is how you run the risk of lowering your work to the level of psychological documentation, – she explains and adds that if such phenomena are not overcome or at least suppressed, nothing will remain of his work but a private psychopathography, which, unfortunately, will not be of interest to anyone in the long run. She invites him to make something out of his unhealthy visions.

When Gala had thus condemned the pictures, Dalí was once more incessant in his convulsive laughter, but she took his hand to show that she understood him, and said:

– My child, you don’t realize that we will never part once more.

This is the beginning of one love!

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And this is how Gala emerges from underground! Desirable Gala; In Dali’s life, childhood dreams resurface and take physical form. “He fell in love with Gala before he fell in love. Before he saw her. He was in love with love, in love with himself, – writes Luji Romer, – and he tried to carve his projection into something unique, exceptional, impressive. At first it swirled in his imagination, only then it turned into flesh, took on life and became a lasting reality: it was Gala.”

In 1929, before he knew Gala, Dali made the painting Imperial Monument to a Maiden, Gala (utopian fantasy). Many call that work Gala’s utopia. But Gala was never a girl for him. Probably, she was not like that in any part of her body. Eliuare and the Surrealists gave a start to this image, expressing their attitude towards women. So, the title of Dali’s painting probably came regarding in a roundregarding way – not without a connection with how Eliuare depicted his wife. For Salvador Dali, and this is clear as day, Gala was a leader, encourager, organizer and manager, but never a girl. He writes that in his life she is simply the woman who fulfills all functions – she is a lover, a mother, a sister.

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Gala, in contrast to Dali, becomes more comfortable in old age. And Dali does not spare her kind words, calling her his abeya (Bitute, lion, nut, squirrel, bell (Spanish).), “because she clears all the essences of the humming hive of my brain”, leoncilla, when she is in a bad mood, noisette poil, “for her face, covered with velvet skin, looks like a nut,” ardilla or cascabel. One might think that there are few artists who idealized and respected their wives as much as Dali.

When life is going downhill, Gala feels not only strong like a lioness, but is also convinced that every moment of life should be revenge, conquest or benefit, in other words, it should be taken with full knuckles. Therefore, it seems self-evident that in the play of Dali and Gala’s life as husband and wife, Gala gets the role of the bad, hard, unsympathetic, insufferable.

Vida Press photo/Gala and Dali

It’s clear that she doesn’t mind at all. She is strong and she wants to be, because a person is really strong not when, she explains once, she is sympathetic, but when he is ashamed to be in such a position. That’s why she’s so desperate for money. This is another area where so-and-so knows so-and-so.

In the material world, says Gala, money is the only way to avoid compassion. Of course, there is still human age and disease, and Gala does not escape either, but she has taken care of everything well in advance, because it would clearly be difficult to express sympathy for her death. She is the one who is able to bind men to her: she was worshiped by Éluard, she was desired by Ernst, and for the painter Dalí she turned into a divine elixir of life. It wasn’t until her last love, Jeff Fenholt, that her strength faltered. But by then she was well over eighty.

At the very beginning, to show his infinite love, Dali had sworn to eat Gala following death. “For me, that would be the ultimate show of love,” he carves. That Gala might ever say goodbye to the world, such a thought does not fit in his head, it is too horrible. And Gala declares that the day of her death will be the most wonderful in her life.

The way death is talked regarding and treated corresponds to the spirit of the time in which people lived. Ever since the fin de sièle (End of the Age (French)) and this beginning, life and death have been perceived as a staging of the individual’s self, and here one goes so far as to flirt even with death. Legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt lies in a coffin until her dramatic end. The ideal of romantic eternal love becomes the joint death of the lovers as liberation and salvation from banal everyday life. In art at the turn of the last century, women have to die first – like, say, Lulu, the primordial woman and the “sweet child”, or Mimi, or… And when women don’t die, then they are stylized to a grab board.