Gala Dalí: The demonic dominatrix behind Salvador Dalí
There are those who believe that Salvador Dalí’s outward madness was a manufactured living exhibition of sorts—those folks clearly don’t know much about the life of Dalí himself. Lobster phones and pet antelopes are mere beige slacks in the weird wardrobe of his life. While we may never truly know the enigmatic artist, it is perhaps his wife, Gala Dalí, who proves the greatest paradigm of the madness behind the madness.
The first peculiarity in this nuptial of nonsense is whether Gala can even be classed as his wife. After all, a marriage must be consummated, and despite hosting endless sex parties, some scholars believe that Salvador may have died a virgin. The late English art critic, Brian Sewell, would famously describe witnessing Dalí “engaging others in orgies of uninhibited sexual congregation, heterosexual, homosexual and both in combination, while he watched fully clothed, the voyeur fumbling in his trousers.” In fact, this fumbling apparently bordered on addiction, but it is unknown whether it was merely confined to a personal trouser act, or he ever went beyond a watchful onesome.
Nevertheless, whether consummated or otherwise, Gala and Salvador were wed in writing, and they would go on to be perhaps one of the most bizarre couples in the natural world. Dalí met Gala after he had left Madrid behind in a maelstrom of unresolved emotions for his friend and perhaps purely platonic love interest, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered, aged 38, by Nationalists during the Spanish civil war.
He left a city in complete turmoil and headed for the captivating milieu of café culture in Paris. Therein, he began to establish his name as an artistic incendiary presence akin to a proto-punk. He would also be expelled from his family by his father during this period. His father was disgusted by his son’s picture of Jesus Christ entitled Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother.
Then, in the midst of a mental episode where he simply laughed hysterically for hours on end, he went back to his beloved childhood retreat of Cadaqués. It was here where he met Gala, and not to besmirch the woman, but it’s hard to see why she was so attracted to the giggling maniac. She was married for a start, although that didn’t seem to matter much to either her or her husband, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. She was also 34, and Salvador was a tender 24-year-old virgin.
Alas, the bond with the laughing painter who once bit the head off a bat as a child becomes clear when you consider the descriptive diatribe that the art dealer, John Richardson, once used to paint a picture of Gala; he said she was an “ancient harridan”, an “authentically Sadean monster”, a “demonic dominatrix”, a “scarlet woman”, and finally said that she had “an appetizing little body, and the libido of an electric eel.”
Gala was born Elena Diakonova. She grew up among a nuclear family of intellectuals in Kazan, Russia. When she was 17, she was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland to be treated for tuberculosis. It was here that she met and fell in love with Éluard. The two teenage lovebirds struck up a blossoming relationship and bonded over their love for the stranger side of art.
However, following her treatment, Gala soon returned to Russia where she took up a teaching job in Moscow. But in 1916, during the hardship of the war, she ventured from Russia to Paris to meet Éluard once more. They soon married and had a child, but Gala hated the rigours of motherhood and neglected their daughter. The first strains of Gala’s strange cruelness and propensity for sadistic individualism were coming to the fore.
This made her a fitting muse of Salvador, and despite his phobia of female genitalia, he was also a match for her. Richardson’s term “demonic dominatrix” perhaps comes closest to encapsulating the rest of her biographical reportage in a single couplet. Her crimes include putting a live pet rabbit in the oven, extinguishing cigarettes on the arms of accomplices when she was tired of listening to them speak and engaging in forgery conspiracies by getting her Salvador to sign several blank canvases as his work slowed in old age and having forgers fill in the rest. But aside from these almost avant-garde atrocities, her relationship with her husband throws up perhaps the biggest contradiction in a life that was as dichotomous as the bewildering artwork it produced.
There is no doubting that Salvador was besotted with Gala, the fact that he built her a castle and lost his will to live when she passed away in 1982, is testimony to this. But it is also true that he could not visit her castle without written permission from her in advance. She also kept a harem of revolving young lovers well into her eighties, frequently have sex parties with the slew of 20–30-year-old men at her disposal. Although Salvador never seemed to care about any of this, perhaps because he was arriving at his own sexual gratification via an addiction to masturbating in front of a mirror, obsessing over Adolf Hitler, or insatiably attempting to amass the most lavish fortune he could.
Somewhere in this clustered cackle of mayhem and madness was a relationship that somehow got the best out of Salvador and allowed him to propagate art, and a persona for that matter, which irrevocably changed the cultural landscape forever. In the end, he enthused to his lover, “It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.” If ever it can be said that two people were made for each other then surely Salvador and Gala represent the world’s hardest two-piece jigsaw puzzle that somehow perfectly pair after a bit of cosmic jiggery-pokery.
She might have even drugged her late husband with a sedative concoction, but as Salvador writes in Hidden Faces: “I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties…”
