{"id":127403,"date":"2018-07-10T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T15:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127403"},"modified":"2018-07-10T12:41:31","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T16:41:31","slug":"when-your-muse-is-also-a-demonic-dominatrix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/10\/when-your-muse-is-also-a-demonic-dominatrix\/","title":{"rendered":"When Your Muse Is Also a Demonic Dominatrix"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s wife, Gala.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s wife, Gala, died in 1982, the first person outside of his household to hear the news was Juan Carlos, the king of Spain. Dal\u00ed telephoned the reigning monarch himself, and for once, this was not an act of posturing or presumption on his behalf. By then, the once-destitute artist had become a surrealist superstar, a multimillionaire, a man whose supreme genius landed him the nickname el maestro<\/em>, the title of marquess, endless fawning fans, and an equally endless litany of clingers-on, copycats, and sycophants. Dal\u00ed had met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, when he was the tender age of twenty-four (and, the story goes, still a virgin). She was ten years his senior, and they lived together for the next fifty-three years, until her death. How would he fare without her?<\/p>\n

Not well. Following her funeral, Dal\u00ed locked himself away in his surrealist tower in P\u00fabol, Spain, drew the curtains, and refused to eat or drink. He denied entry to his friends and aides and forbade anyone to speak Gala\u2019s name. As he writes in\u00a0The Unspeakable Confessions\u00a0<\/em>in 1973, the castle itself was a testament to his love:<\/em><\/p>\n

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 P\u00fabol in La Bisbal, where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1984, two years after her death, a fire broke out in his bedroom under suspicious circumstances, and Dal\u00ed was horribly burned. In the hospital, they discovered he was suffering from severe malnutrition, and his staff was accused of negligence. But the truth, as Gala\u2019s biographer Tim McGirk writes in Wicked Lady<\/em><\/a>, is that \u201cafter Gala\u2019s death, Dal\u00ed lost his will to paint or even live.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is easy to imagine the woman who inspired such adoration and devotion from her husband as a gentle, supportive, nurturing type. A figure who posed for him and looked after him and gave him the space to cultivate his talent. The ministering angel to Dal\u00ed\u2019s cacophonous madness. But a world in which Gala can be cast as a passive motherly companion is a world driven crazy by patriarchy and its assumptions. At her best, Gala was difficult and intense. At her worst, she was nothing short of monstrous. She had no friends and maintained a malevolent distance from her family. Described as \u201ccruel, fierce and small\u201d and having \u201ceyes that pierced walls,\u201d she collected stuffed toys but once cooked her own pet rabbit. Her \u201cdemonic temper\u201d asserted itself often; if she didn\u2019t like someone\u2019s face, she spat at them, and if she wanted to silence someone, she would stub cigarettes out on their arm. Not surprisingly, she was hugely unpopular. Women particularly disliked her. Gala was sexually voracious and had no respect for other people\u2019s relationships. Dealers in Paris nicknamed her Gala la Gale<\/em>\u2014gale<\/em> means both \u201ca spiteful person\u201d and \u201cscabies.\u201d The filmmaker Luis Bu\u00f1uel, who, with Dal\u00ed, made the seminal short film Un chien Andalou<\/em>,\u00a0got so sick of Gala\u2019s insults that he once tried to throttle her. In a 1998 Vanity Fair<\/em> article<\/a>\u00a0rife with gendered language that now feels blessedly dated, John Richardson, one of Dal\u00ed\u2019s art dealers in the early seventies, refers to Gala as an \u201cancient harridan,\u201d \u201can authentically Sadean monster,\u201d a \u201cdemonic dominatrix,\u201d a \u201cscarlet woman,\u201d and as having \u201can appetizing little body, and the libido of an electric eel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toward the end of her life, already addicted to Dal\u00ed\u2019s money, Gala gambled away huge sums in the underground casinos of New York. She maintained something of a male harem, a perpetual parade of young lovers, when she herself was well into her eighties. The castle itself was famously off-limits to Dal\u00ed unless he received a written invitation from Gala, an arrangement that seemed to suit them both. In the late seventies, she became besotted with Jeff Fenholt, who had played the title character in the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar<\/em>, and during their affair, she gifted him several Dal\u00ed canvases and bought him a house on Long Island valued at $1.25 million. Dal\u00ed himself found out only when he saw Fenholt had put his artworks up for auction at Christie\u2019s. Eager to keep money coming in when her husband could no longer paint, she forced him to sign blank canvases and commissioned forgers to complete the paintings, selling them at sky-high original-Dal\u00ed prices. Consequently, dealers are often suspicious of any of the artist\u2019s works created from the mid sixties onward. Toward the very end, when Gala was almost certainly senile, she was medicating Dal\u00ed with concoctions of unidentified drugs and may well have been the cause of a nervous disorder that brought on Parkinson\u2019s disease and definitively terminated his career.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So far, a considerable list of sins. How, one might wonder, was Dal\u00ed able to love her, in his own words, \u201cmore than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso, and even more than money\u201d? One fact remains indisputable\u2014Gala was not just his wife; she was his muse. He painted her as a Madonna twice, as Leda with the swan, as a nude. He produced countless portraits. When she had a hysterectomy, he painted The Bleeding Roses<\/em>,\u00a0which shows Gala\u2019s familiar blonde hair and her figure with a bushel of crimson roses across her stomach, the petals of which turn into drops of blood. He thrived off her emotions; one might go so far as to say he appropriated her pains for his oeuvre. Certainly, it would be fair to say that Gala is the most recurring motif in Dal\u00ed\u2019s work. As the activist and author Germaine Greer writes: \u201cA muse is anything but a paid model. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gala performed some special quasi-alchemical function. She sparked Dal\u00ed\u2019s imagination like nothing else could. But for Gala, these canvases were not a matter of vanity. Her work wasn\u2019t restricted to sitting still long enough to be immortalized in oil. Gala acted as agent, dealer, promoter, and jailer; she channeled all her ruthlessness into her promotion of him. Many have argued that this was avarice on her behalf, but the truth, as always, is more complicated.<\/p>\n

When she and the young Dal\u00ed met in Cadaqu\u00e9s, his hometown on Costa Brava, Gala was already thirty-four years old and the wife of the celebrated surrealist poet Paul \u00c9luard. The \u00c9luards were bohemian, part of caf\u00e9 society, and at the center of artistic Paris. Their marriage was a liberal one; each party encouraged the other in affairs. For a time, Gala and Paul even lived in a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois with the painter Max Ernst. But despite her freedoms, both sexual and financial (Paul \u00c9luard had been left a sizable inheritance by his father), Gala was beginning to feel bored. Having already played muse to her poet husband and his friends and mixed with their intellectual milieu, she had an understanding and an eye for art. She was doubtless looking for fulfillment, but she was also genuinely struck by Dal\u00ed\u2019s talent. The trip to Cadaqu\u00e9s had been a sort of holiday-cum-intervention, organized by her husband, who dragged her along with the fellow surrealists Ren\u00e9 and Georgette Magritte and Camille Goemans. Dal\u00ed\u2019s friends in Paris and his gallerist were awaiting works from him, but Dal\u00ed seemed to be in the midst of some sort of nervous breakdown, a \u201clunacy\u201d that led him to dissolve into fits of hysterical laughter whenever he tried to speak. His friends and agents were becoming desperate; they needed him lucid. With Gala\u2019s arrival, the group noticed a change in Dal\u00ed, and as Gala\u2019s biographer Tim McGirk writes, they decided that \u201cif Dal\u00ed was so besotted by Gala perhaps she alone could help him.\u201d Their little conspiratorial plot was to send her on a \u201cpsychic rescue mission to pull him out of his madness.\u201d Miraculously, she was able to stabilize his mood. Dal\u00ed finished the paintings necessary for his exhibition, and from then on, they barely left each other\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

One must not underestimate the sacrifices Gala made to be with Dal\u00ed. Despite her love of money, she left her wealthy family in Paris, swapping a luxury apartment for a shack on the beach. They had no running water, no electricity, no heat, and no stove. It was Gala\u2019s job to maintain Dal\u00ed\u2019s morale, to pose for him, to dress him, to soothe him and comfort him, and to barter for bruised fruit at the market, making their few pennies stretch. If she was his muse, she was also his mother, a symbolic role that she made real by adding a sinister dimension: Gala abandoned her own child to take care of Dal\u00ed instead. Finally, it was Gala who peddled his canvases from gallery to gallery, who convinced a wealthy art patron to subsidize the lease on their shack, and who, in the wake of Europe\u2019s bankruptcy at the end of World War I, conjured up the scheme of defecting to wealthy America and selling his work there. In one particularly ingenious move, she persuaded a group of aristocrats led by Prince de Faucigny-Lucinge to \u201ctoss a yearly sum of 2500 francs into the pot for Dal\u00ed, and over a sumptuous dinner they would hold a draw, with the winner getting Dali\u2019s newest work.\u201d The plan was machinated to appeal to the dissolute, gambling young nobles, and of course it did. Whatever people saw as her spitefulness, she never had any artistic pretensions of her own, and she never spoke about herself or her past, lest it should take away from the Dal\u00ed aura.<\/p>\n

In the end, Gala profited from her ferocious championing of Dal\u00ed. She is blamed with corrupting and commercializing his art. She\u2019s judged for being promiscuous, aggressive, single-minded, and ambitious (qualities for which men are more often celebrated). More often still, she is not remembered at all. Yet without Gala, the great artist might never have been. Dal\u00ed\u2019s imagination is often seen as a force of its own, but in reality, it was a fragile construct, unable to flourish without Gala, whom he used as a shield. Behind her, he would be safe to create; without her, he would be swept away. Dal\u00ed honored this coauthorship of his life. As early as the thirties, he began to sign his canvases with both their names even though she\u2019d never so much as lifted a brush. \u201cIt is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures,\u201d he told her.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nina-Sophia Miralles is the founder and editor of <\/em>Londnr\u00a0magazine, a print and digital-culture publication based in London. She has also written for <\/em>Harrods\u00a0magazine and hosts a literary salon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s wife, Gala.     When Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s wife, Gala, died in 1982, the first person outside of his household to hear the news was Juan Carlos, the king of Spain. Dal\u00ed telephoned the reigning monarch himself, and for once, this was not an act of posturing or presumption on his behalf. By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[21371,11426,17054,11613,34671,34668,34667,670,34670,34666,34669],"class_list":["post-127403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-gala","tag-germaine-greer","tag-luis-bunuel","tag-max-ernst","tag-prince-de-faucigny-lucinge","tag-pubol","tag-pubol-in-la-bisbal","tag-salvador-dali","tag-the-bleeding-roses","tag-tim-mcgirk","tag-un-chien-andalou"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Your Muse Is Also a Demonic Dominatrix<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the controversial reputation of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s wife, Gala.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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