Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí

As both muse and career manager of her husband Salvador, Gala Dalí was a central figure in one of the most interesting and provocative art movements of the 20th century, surrealism. A response to the violent madness of WWI in Europe, surrealism proposed a new form of consciousness by elevating the world of dreams and the subconscious mind to primacy over bourgeois society’s reliance on reason and logic as guides to life.

An ideological movement as well as an art form, surrealism sought to transform human relationships by orienting them around instinct and intuition rather than conventional social norms of behavior. It put art in the service of cultural reform. The method of surrealist art was disruption of our accepted modes of seeing through startling combinations of images that had no counterpart in everyday reality.

Gala was an integral figure in the circle of theorists and practitioners—André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard—who gave birth to surrealism. Her skill at publicizing the work of her husband, monetizing his talent, and introducing him to wealthy patrons and collectors, was indispensable to his fame and financial success. Her cause was aided by Dalí’s fondness for exhibitionism and his flamboyant persona. They lived a glittering life, lionized by high society in Europe and America, celebrated wherever they went.

Klein documents Gala’s role in Dalí’s career in great detail, and yet her biography disappoints because it fails to give the reader an in-depth psychological portrait of her subject that illuminates both her attraction to surrealism and her deep connection to Dalí. Klein is content to skate along the surface of Gala’s life, giving us endless details of her travels, her residences, her wardrobe, her meals, her parties, her wealthy friends, but she never investigates Gala’s heart and soul, and so the reader is left with merely a chronicle of a woman of humble origins who used her husband’s art as a passport to life among the rich and famous.

Gala was born in Kazan, an ancient Russian city on the Volga River, her birth date variously cited as 1894 and 1890. She was christened Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. A friend she met in Moscow years later gave her the nickname Gala. She came from an undistinguished family, the second of four children. Her mother was a midwife, her father a civil servant and drunkard who abandoned the family when Gala was 10.

Her mother moved to Moscow, where she remarried, to a wealthy Jewish Armenian merchant who lavished attention on Gala and provided for her education. In 1913 she was admitted to a sanitarium in Switzerland, her fragile health and spirit damaged by a sexual advance from her older brother Vadka. There she met the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, who would become her first husband.

Following her discharge from the sanitarium Gala returned briefly to Moscow, then traveled to Paris to be with Éluard, who had been drafted into the French army for its war with Germany. Gala and Paul were married in February 1917. A year later their daughter Cécile was born but given over to the care of Paul’s mother.

Éluard worked for his father, a wealthy banker. His wealth enabled Paul and Gala to become art patrons. They became part of the surrealist movement in France when one of Paul’s poems was published in Littérature, a literary magazine edited by Breton and Aragon.

Following the war Gala and Paul traveled to Germany to visit the artist Max Ernst, who had been branded a subversive by the government and forbidden to leave the country. Paul purchased one of his paintings, and Gala was attracted to him. They invited Ernst to join their household and a ménage à trois was established in Paris, to which Ernst traveled on Paul’s borrowed passport.

Crumbling under the stress of his domestic arrangement Éluard disappeared suddenly in March 1924 and turned up in Tahiti. His father ended the support on which Gala and Ernst relied, triggering the return of Éluard and the demise of the ménage à trois. Gala and Paul restarted their life in the elegant country home Paul’s father had given them and resumed buying art. When Paul’s father died in the spring of 1927, Paul became independently wealthy.

In April 1926 Salvador Dalí, a promising new artist painting in the surrealist manner, came to Paris to show his work and through Breton was introduced to Gala and Paul and other leading figures in the surrealist movement. Subsequently, Gala and Paul visited Dalí at his home in Cadaques, Spain, and there Gala and Dalí formed a bond that lasted the rest of her life. She and Paul divorced in July 1931 and a year and a half later Dalí and Gala married.

From this point forward Klein’s biography becomes an account of their marriage, with a focus on Gala’s efforts to steer her husband’s career, inspire his art, connect him to patrons, spread his fame, and manage the rapidly increasing wealth that flowed into their bank accounts from sales of his work. Gala’s skill in monetizing Dalí’s talent across numerous creative fields, including painting, scene design, costume and jewelry design, and performance art featuring Dalí’s flagrant exhibitionism, made the pair international celebrities.

Klein shadows the Dalís as they move among the rich and famous in France, Spain, Italy, England, and America, cataloguing in painstaking detail their lifestyle of conspicuous consumption through repetitive descriptions of the residences in which they lived, the clothing and jewelry they wore, the meals they consumed, the lavish parties and balls they gave and attended, and the wealthy celebrities with whom they socialized. Her gratuitous insistence on the splendors of the Dalí’s opulent lifestyle has the unintended effect of bringing the reader to the point of “aesthetic nausea,” to borrow another term from Thorstein Veblen. Even when reporting Gala’s death, Klein cannot resist informing the reader how elegantly her corpse was clothed for burial.

What’s missing from this book, apart from illustrations of Dalí’s art, is penetration of Gala’s character beneath the surface glamor of her life among the Western world’s privileged upper class. Why was she attracted to surrealism? What, other than co-dependence, was the basis of her bond with Salvador Dalí? Was she more than an opportunist with a genius for marketing and promoting her husband’s artistic talent? Klein doesn’t raise these important questions, let alone attempt to answer them.

Especially because Dalí’s paintings are meant to be psychological in their impact, drawing as they do on material from the subconscious and the dream life, surely an in-depth exploration of the psychological relationship between the painter and his muse/business manager is called for. But Klein does not investigate at this depth.

In her final paragraph, Klein writes that Gala was “sui generis”—a one of a kind individual. She presents her as “an example of self-realization”—heady praise, but difficult to credit. How can there be self-realization if there is no self? Or is that the point? Gala remains as mysterious as the date of her birth.