SURREAL: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí, by Michèle Gerber Klein
What is the value of a muse? That’s the central question of Michèle Gerber Klein’s biography of Gala Dalí, “Surreal.” Dalí was known as “the Mother of Surrealism,” the wife of Salvador, an adviser, a seductress. But as with so many influential women, her role was deliberately unseen.
She was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, outside Moscow, in either 1890 or 1894 — depending on whose story you believe. When she was a child, her father disappeared while prospecting Siberian gold and her mother ended up going against religious rules barring widows from remarrying, wedding a Jewish Armenian lawyer.
Gala was not allowed a higher education in pre-revolutionary Russia. She was also subject to disturbing harassment from her brother, who often appeared in her room at night. She claimed he never acted on any desires, but that the experience was emotionally excruciating. She developed a dry cough and an anxious demeanor and was sent to a Swiss sanitarium in 1912.
There, she met Paul Éluard, soon to become one of the most famous poets in France. He would write her at least three poems about Pierrot the clown as they strolled through meadows of wildflowers. By the time both were pronounced cured, in 1914, they had to face not just disapproving parents but war. There was a lot of locking themselves in respective rooms in France and Russia to compose long love letters.
Gala managed to travel to France, where she and Éluard married in 1917 and, the following year, had a daughter, Cécile. Both mother and child suffered from fragile health and “did not bond.” Cécile was raised mostly by relatives and Gala was allowed to live a life, for better or worse, largely unfettered by child care.
Paul and Gala became key members of the Dada movement. Gerber Klein, who previously wrote a vivid biography of the designer Charles James, relishes illustrating the power dynamics at play in burgeoning art scenes. Other Surrealists and their wives disliked Gala; she was not invited to the all-male meeting of the editorial panel of the Dada magazine, Littérature. But Gala was never one to dwell on a slight; and in any case, there was always the distraction of another trip to the south of France to cure a cold or do some gambling.
In the tumult between the wars, while Gala was coming off a complicated entanglement with the artist Max Ernst, Éluard was dancing in Paris with another woman when he met the young Salvador Dalí. Dalí invited Éluard to visit him in Cadaqués, a Catalonian town just south of the French border.
The Éluards showed up in the summer of 1929, and Gala spent the summer wearing bespoke silk pajamas, drinking Pernod and falling in love with Dalí. “She could help him realize his talent, which in many ways expressed her own way of seeing. She was 10 years his senior, and she found the artist’s youth and neediness very appealing,” Gerber Klein writes. “Here was someone she could take in hand, buck up and lead.” And Dalí, a virgin at 25, seemed unlikely to stray.
Gala taught him to dress better, to stop throwing chicken bones at the ceiling after eating and how to be less trusting. She divorced Éluard and married Dalí in 1934. In their mutual devotion, the couple were compared to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Gala Dalí also took charge of her husband’s finances — paying the bills, signing the contracts and negotiating fees. If they had money troubles, she kept them hidden; in her words, “pity kills strength.”
Fixtures in the “fluid high society of the interwar period” where everyone from Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Alfred Hitchcock to Bob Hope and Gloria Vanderbilt made a cameo, the couple spent most of their time in America, where Gala understood that her husband could make real money. Accordingly, Salvador Dalí designed a perfume bottle and a ceramic ashtray for Air India’s first-class passengers and painted a lot of society portraits. In 1936, he made the cover of Time magazine.
They returned to Europe in the late 1940s, the richest and most famous couple in art. “She played wife, tigress, lover and mother, fashion influencer and model, art-world royalty and art critic manager, hard-nosed negotiator, welcoming hostess, bill collector, nurse and always the recurring mystical centerpiece of her husband’s work,” Gerber Klein writes.
While Gala Dalí comes off as fascinating and enigmatic, Gerber Klein makes it clear that her subject was willfully unknowable. She declined interviews and cultivated mystery. Guarded even with intimates, she was known as “The Tower.” Readers of “Surreal” will not come away with a better idea of what she thought about or what she was like when alone.
Maybe that’s because she never was. Gerber Klein concludes that Gala Dalí was more than a muse and more than a partner — that what she did was unquantifiable. But one thing is certain: Whatever else, she was a woman who knew her own worth.
SURREAL: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí | By Michèle Gerber Klein | Harper | 325 pp. | $32
The post Wife, Tigress, Influencer, Accountant, Nurse, Muse, Mystery appeared first on New York Times.
