Loved by Dalí, loathed by everyone else, Gala Diakonova wielded extraordinary power over her husband and his work. As a new exhibition of the surrealist master opens in London, Justine Picardie delves into the little-known life of a woman who was 'part tiger, part martyr'If Salvador Dalí is one of the most famous and popular of 20th-century artists, then his Russian wife and muse, Gala, remains curiously unknown.
'But for her, my son would have ended up under a bridge in Paris,' said Dalí’s father of Gala and her head for figures'
Her image is everywhere in his paintings - her face, her breasts, her body, exposed for the world to see - yet the truth of her life, and their marriage, is far less evident.
Dalí's fellow surrealists called her 'the Tower' (because of her secretiveness) or 'the Sibyl of the Steppes'; but despite the air of mystery that surrounded her, she nevertheless revealed just enough of herself to be as loathed by many in Dalí's circle as she was adored by the artist himself.
The art critic Robert Hughes has described her as a 'very nasty and very extravagant harpy of a wife'; while Dalí's long-standing American patron, Albert Reynolds Morse, wrote, after 12 years of knowing Gala, that she was 'part tiger, part martyr, part mother, part mistress and part banker, a curious and inaccessible mixture' and so 'single-purposed' in her ambition for her husband's career that she had no real friends.
Visitors to Tate Modern's latest Dalí exhibition are unlikely to find any more clues there about the enigmatic woman who propelled the artist to such fame and fortune (this show concentrates on Dalí's film work, in which Gala remains an unseen figure).
So one might turn, instead, to Dalí's own, written accounts of his wife; only to discover that although these are as physically explicit as his paintings of her, her emotions remain entirely hidden from sight.
He describes his first impressions of Gala in his memoir, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, when he was introduced to her on holiday in Cadaqués, in north-east Spain, in August 1929.
'Her body still had the build of a child's,' he wrote approvingly, though Gala was in fact 35 at the time, ten years older than Dalí, and already married to the French poet Paul Eluard.
'Her shoulder blades and the sub-renal muscles had that somewhat sudden athletic tension of an adolescent's. But the small of her back, on the other hand, was extremely feminine and pronounced, and served as an infinitely svelte hyphen between the wilful, energetic and proud leanness of her torso and her very delicate buttocks, which the exaggerated slenderness of her waist enhanced and rendered greatly more desirable.'
The fact that Gala was there with her husband and their 11-year-old daughter, Cécile, proved no obstacle to the start of her relationship with Dalí (hardly surprising, given that she'd already had a number of lovers by then, and had lived in a ménage à trois for a time with Eluard and the German artist Max Ernst).
Gala had never shown much interest in her daughter; according to Dalí's biographer, Ian Gibson, she 'soon decided that Cécile was an intolerable encumbrance, virtually dumping her on Eluard's mother'.
Gala herself was born Helena Diakonova Devulina in the Russian city of Kazan in 1894. Her father, Ivan, was a high-ranking Moscow civil servant; her mother, Antonia, an educated woman who published a collection of children's stories.
When Gala was ten, her father disappeared, leaving his wife with four children (Gala had a younger sister and two older brothers). 'One version has it that he died in Siberia, gold-prospecting for the Tsar,' writes Gibson in The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 'another that he abandoned Antonia, presumably for someone else...
More...
