Hanging in the Thyssen art museum in Madrid is Salvador Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking (1944). Suspended in a watery landscape a naked, sleeping woman lies with both arms behind her head. She floats above a grey rock and is surrounded by hovering elements from her dream: two drops of water, an elephant on long stilt-like legs, two pouncing tigers, a pomegranate and a buzzing bee.
As one of the most iconic images of surrealism, Dalí’s painting epitomises the cultural movement’s emphasis on the subconscious, dreams and desire. It also demonstrates the surrealists’ obsession with, and reliance on, the female muse. While the movement’s male artists have been much critiqued for fragmenting and fetishising women’s bodies, which they treated as sites of erotic desire, they also celebrated the irrationality of great romantic love, seeking out and taking inspiration from real-life partners, many of whom were also artists.
Among the most significant romantic muses of surrealism, and asleep in Dalí’s painting, is Gala Dalí. Today, she has been overlooked, misrepresented and even defamed within many art historical narratives, in which she has been referred to as a ‘demonic dominatrix’, and cast as a money-grabbing monster. But, if we awaken Gala, will we find that such accusations and insults are well-deserved? Why did she gain such an awful reputation? What was the real role she played as a romantic muse in the life of those artists she inspired?
Born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova to a family of Russian intellectuals in 1895, Gala was given her nickname by the poet Paul Éluard, whom she met in a Swiss sanatorium where they were both recovering from tuberculosis as teenagers. Aged seventeen, Gala was a strong-minded and independent young woman and, following her engagement to Éluard, she moved away from her family to Paris to embark on a new life with him and their daughter, who was born shortly afterwards.
Early on, Gala inspired her husband to write numerous love poems, including ‘Woman in Love’ and ‘The Curve of Your Eyes’, with which he built his reputation as a writer. Far from simply existing as the subject matter of her husband’s work, she also acted as a critic and champion, and even wrote the preface to one of his earliest books, Dialogue des inutiles (1914): ‘Do not be shocked that a woman – or rather, a stranger – is presenting this little volume to the reader,’ she declared, albeit under a pseudonym. ‘She decided to play an invisible role even if that role was important,’ explains the art historian and curator Estrella de Diego.
As a founding member of surrealism, Éluard introduced his magnetic wife to artists in the group, encouraging partnerships – both artistic and romantic – between her and other surrealists. Fully immersing herself in the movement, Gala soon became a significant subject in the work of Man Ray as well as Max Ernst, with whom the couple lived in a ménage à trois for three years. In his closely cropped oil painting Gala Éluard (1924) Ernst, who worked collaboratively from a photograph by Man Ray, has depicted Gala’s wide brown eyes framed with dark lashes, above which strange objects seem to unfurl from her mind.
Across photographs and paintings, Gala became the face of surrealism, her intense dark eyes acting as a symbolic window into the unconscious mind. The surrealists were inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud and, as their leader André Breton set out in the founding manifesto of 1924, were committed to the ‘resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality’. Wide-eyed and named in the title of this work, Gala is imagined not as a passive sitter, but as an active and recognised participant in the surrealists’ explorations into inner realities, for which they were dependent on female muses for inspiration.
Similarly, in his enigmatic portrait Au Rendez Vous des Amis (1922), Ernst portrays Gala as an involved member of the group. The viewer encounters fifteen surrealists, alongside the historical figures who inspired them: Ernst sits on Dostoyevsky’s knee, surrounded by Éluard, Breton and Giorgio de Chirico, among others. Standing among these men, and staring out at the viewer, is the only woman: Gala. Wearing a pleated long mauve dress with her dark hair pinned back, she is a decisively feminine presence within the group, pictured both on equal terms with, and acting as the accomplice to, her male counterparts.
While Gala had already become an impressive force and critical presence within the movement by the early 1920s, she was yet to meet the artist with whom she would strike up the most significant creative collaboration. Once again, it was her husband who made the introduction. During the summer of 1929, Gala joined Éluard on a trip to the Catalonian town of Cadaqués to meet a young, emerging Spanish painter, then working on the periphery of surrealism: Salvador Dalí.
Following her visit to Spain, Gala started an affair with Dalí, which Éluard must have thought would be a temporary liaison, much like the earlier fling with Ernst. This relationship, however, was far from fleeting. As Dalí later wrote, ‘She was destined to be my Gradiva, the one who moves forward, my victory, my wife.’ Gala soon abandoned her now successful, wealthy husband for the penniless artist, swapping her chic Parisian flat for a fishing village in Spain. Many must have been surprised by her actions at the time, not least Éluard, but Gala was on a mission of her own.
We often think of artists choosing their muses, yet in the case of Gala, it was distinctly the other way round. Not only was she interested in Dalí as a romantic partner; Gala had also spotted talent that needed nurturing. Here was an opportunity for her to assume even greater responsibility in the surrealist movement than she had already achieved, as Dalí’s dominant muse. Over the next sixty years, he painted Gala – who became his wife in 1932 – hundreds of times. The themes of love, desire and worship came to dominate Dalí’s paintings, in which Gala appears as various mythological goddesses and the Madonna.
Most often, Dalí painted Gala as herself, frequently from behind as he loved the shape of her back. In the iconic image My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture (1945) Gala is seated, facing away from the viewer, nearly naked, with a white cloth draped only across her lap to reveal her strong, slim back. Staring at a dreamlike landscape in the distance, she looks upon a duplicated image of herself; however, this second surreal body is formed from strong stone columns and a staircase.
Dalí reflected on the metaphor of Gala as an architectural palace: ‘I would polish Gala to make her shine, make her the happiest possible, caring for her more than myself, because without her, it would all end.’ He recognised his wife’s strength, made visible in the image of her as a solid structure, which infused their relationship: ‘Gala became the salt of my life, the steel of my personality, my beacon, my double – ME. Henceforth there were Dalí and Gala united for eternity.’
By this time, the artist had started to use the signature ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’ on many of his works: ‘In signing my paintings “Gala–Dalí” I was simply giving a name to an existential truth, for without my twin, Gala, I would not exist any more.’ Through this mutual signature, Dalí recognised Gala’s critical contribution to his creative output. In contrast to so many artists throughout history, who have failed to acknowledge the hands of their wives in the production of their work, Dalí outwardly declared the shared endeavour between artist and muse by naming her.
Nowhere is the Gala–Dalí collaboration clearer than in a series of black-and-white photographs of the couple working on a pavilion titled the Dream of Venus for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. These pictures demonstrate Gala’s artistic input, alongside a team of fabricators, in devising the design of this sensational surrealist attraction; the site was turned into a spectacular dream, filled with models dressed as pianos, lobsters and mermaids.
While Gala had worked with artists before, with Dalí she found she could, to a much greater extent, exert her influence in a whole manner of ways. Beyond working on artworks with him, Gala acted as her husband’s agent, promoting his work widely and negotiating contracts with commercial galleries. She was such a confident businesswoman that the artist Giorgio de Chirico asked her to become his agent, too. That Gala navigated all of this, in such a male-dominated society, is testament to her ambition and determination for the Gala–Dalí brand.
Her growing power did not go unnoticed: the surrealists’ leader, Breton, began to see her as a rival, resenting her relationship with and influence over artists in the movement. It’s clear that he was threatened by this woman. It’s true that Gala was certainly difficult at times; Dalí referred to her as ‘Lionette’, explaining that ‘when she gets angry she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion’. Some of her behaviour was undoubtedly deplorable – she is known to have asked Dalí to sign thousands of blank sheets on which forgers created fake Dalís, which she subsequently sold for huge sums of money.
Gala is also known to have had numerous extramarital affairs with younger men, many of them also artists, throughout her open marriage to Dalí. Much has been written about Dalí’s complex relationship with sex and it is widely believed that he derived gratification from watching Gala sleep with other men, rather than engaging in it himself. As he said, ‘I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overrated.’ Dr Zoltan Kovary, a Hungarian clinical psychologist, has even posited that she took on the role of Dalí’s mother: ‘Gala sometimes called Salvador, “my little son”. They never had a “real” sexual relationship,’ said Kovary. ‘Dalí, although Gala raised deep desires in him, had fear of physical contact.’
Although Kovary’s reading is extreme, what is certain is that Gala was awarded a huge amount of control in her marriage to Dalí, which has sparked criticism. In a 1998 essay for Vanity Fair, art historian John Richardson labelled her an ‘ancient harridan’, a ‘demonic dominatrix’ and ‘one of the nastiest wives a major modern artist ever saddled himself with’. These gendered insults say more about his misogyny than about Gala herself, and it’s a position perpetuated by art historical narratives, which have turned on her, attacking her for qualities celebrated in men. Not fitting within the trope of the passive romantic muse, perpetuated by art history for far too long, she became a threatening figure to many.
Feminist art history, too, has somewhat excluded Gala from many of its discussions on surrealism. The movement attracted many women to its ranks, and much has been written about those female muses who were also artists: Dora Maar, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo and Lee Miller, among others. Art historians like Whitney Chadwick have brought to life surrealism’s women, reasoning that they subverted surrealism to present themselves as the muses of their more complex, layered self-portraits, and thus further their own creative careers.
These women surrealists were undoubtedly using their practice to challenge male artists’ portrayal of them. Many of the male surrealists depicted women as idealised sexualised beings, often faceless femme-enfants, distorted and doll-like (most famously Hans Bellmer, who constructed life-sized pubescent female dolls). In contrast, these female artists put themselves back together; looking within themselves, as the source of their own inspiration, they fashioned fantastical costumes and presented themselves as enchanted beings, merging the image of feminine muse and maker.
However, if we consider Dalí’s paintings of Gala, he also positions her as both an inspiring and creative force. In My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture, he celebrates Gala as a thinking being who looks upon the imagined ivory tower-like vision – it’s as if she has dreamt or conjured it up herself. Far from presenting her as a simplified femme-enfant, Dalí treats his romantic muse in sacred terms and the empowered protagonist of this narrative.
Of course, it’s easy to see why Gala is sometimes forgotten in feminist narratives of art history, which have either underestimated or critiqued her role as an ally to the movement which was in many ways misogynistic. In contrast to numerous other female surrealists, Gala seems content to have worked with and through multiple male artists, at times acting as a silent partner. However, in Dalí she found an artist who declared, in the co-signed works, her immense contribution. Perhaps, too, he portrayed her as she would have chosen to present herself, elevating her to the status of goddess, recognising the potency of her own imagination, and defining femininity as a source of strength; as such the ‘Gala–Dalí’ labelled artworks can be seen as her self-portraits.
It’s obvious that Gala embraced, rather than resented, the responsibilities of being an artist’s muse. She committed to this role fully – even, in effect, abandoning her own daughter for it. In a 2014 interview, Cécile Éluard said of her mother, ‘After she met Dalí she was not interested in me anymore. She was never very warm […] she was very mysterious, very secretive. I never got to meet my Russian family. I didn’t even know when exactly she was born.’ Cecile, who went to live with her paternal grandmother in Paris, saw her mother just once or twice a year. Like ‘great’ artists, ‘great’ muses too have behaved deplorably in their personal lives, serving art above all else.
Gala’s unwavering commitment to Dalí, and their shared endeavour, was matched by his dedication to her; this is evident in the artist’s reverential paintings of his surrealist heroine. Not only did he repay her in immortalising artworks in which she is the focus; in 1969, Dalí bought Gala an incredible gift – a gothic castle, located in the Catalonian village of Púbol. Remodelling and renovating the derelict castle, Dalí curated a final homage to his muse, furnishing it to her taste, complete with a throne by its entrance, and the letter G, for Gala, adorning the ceilings with romantic decoration. As he explained:
Everything celebrates the cult of Gala, even the round room, with its perfect echo that crowns the building as a whole and which is like a dome of this Galactic cathedral. When I walk around this house I look at myself and I see my concentricity. I like its moorish rigour. I needed to offer Gala a case more solemnly worthy of our love. That is why I gave her a mansion built on the remains of a 12th century castle: the old castle of Púbol in La Bisbal, where she would reign like an absolute sovereign…
In this light, Dalí’s earlier painting, My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture, in which Gala looks upon her second self, imagined as a palace, seems to foreshadow the artist’s present to her. Gala’s response to this gift also sums up the power dynamic in their relationship: ‘I accept, with one condition, which is that: You only come to visit me at the Castle on invitation. I accept, since I accept everything in principle, on condition that there are conditions. It is the same condition as courtly love.’
In the 1970s, Gala moved into the castle and, when invited by hand-written invitation, Dalí visited her there. When she died in 1982, Dalí was heartbroken: he buried her in the castle, within a crypt designed to resemble a chessboard, thereby honouring her within an artwork once again. This was the ultimate mausoleum for his muse, to whom he was devoted, to the point of subservience. Utilising and exploiting the idea of the romantic muse for her own means, Gala perceived and earned the privilege associated with it.
If we consider Dalí as synonymous with surrealism, we should do the same with Gala too. She was the strong romantic lead for many of the movement’s artists, sharing and shaping their lives. Most significantly, she committed to Dalí, acting as agent, champion, inspiration, creative partner and the protagonist of his paintings. In return, he openly acknowledged the agency of his muse – unlike many male artists, and narratives, across history. Nowhere is Dalí’s gratitude reflected more than in the gift of this castle, fit for a queen.