Salvador Dali was one weird-ass dude. Can I say that? He was! But so was his wife, Gala—I mean, she was weird, too. Born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in 1894 (having passed away on 10 June 1982), she usually went by “Gala.” She became the wife of both the poet Paul Éluard and then eventually of the artist Salvador Dalí. She was muse to both of them and to a long list of heavy-hitters in early-mid 20th-century literature, art, and popular culture. Having endured a stint in a Swiss sanatorium to treat her tuberculosis, she met her future husband Paul Éluard there. They courted and in 1918 tied the knot.
Having been introduced to Surrealist art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, Gala joined the movement and was inspired by and in turn inspired a number of its leading lights, including her first husband Paul Eluard but also Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Louis Aragon. Robert McNab’s magnificent biography, published in 2004, Ghost Ships: a Surrealist love triangle, details a many-years-long menage-a-trois in which she was the fulcra.
Eventually, in late 1929, two of the three lovebirds met an emerging light in Surrealist painting, the Spanish enfant terrible, one Salvador Dalí. Gala was a decade his senior and amorous in the extreme. He fell head-over-heels in love with her but was seriously genitophobic and a virgin when they met. Yet and still, they became lovers and lived a long and abrasively productive life. He wrote and dedicated many books to her, from Le Diners de Gala (1973) to Dali de Gala (1962) to Los Vinos de Gala (1977). He illustrated her in near countless sketches, paintings, posters and assemblages and in 1931 began to sign his works also with her name, “it is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.” He bought her Castle Pubol in 1968; she made him give plenty of advance notice before she granted him permission to visit.
Gala inspired him also in his own book production, for example, his Le Mythe Tragique De L'Angelus De Millet, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert of Paris, France, in 1963. I just bought a copy of the Special Limited Edition. It’s bound in sailcloth and fastens with a belt through a clasp. It features tipped-in plates, repeating images, goofy couples and frightening grasshopper proboscises. Pauvert was an influential patron of a Chicago-based art historian and impresario, Don Baum. Baum gave his copy to my new friend, Dr. Sue Taylor, noted Professor Emerita of Portland State University, from whom I got my copy.
Did Salvador touch my copy? Did Gala? Dr. Taylor is a Hans Bellmer expert. You think Salvador Dali was weird? You don’t know Hans Bellmer.
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