Dali Planet #32: Goemans Gallery
– A dog like a dagger
On June 6, 1928, “Un Chien Andalou” had its premiere in Paris, and the avant-garde critics raved about it. The film, Dali boasted, “plunged like a dagger” into the city’s heart.
In November Dali’s first one-man show in the City of Lights was held at the Goemans Gallery, with 11 paintings on view. Camille Goemans had sent him an enthusiastic telegram in Cadaques saying he was prepared to buy three paintings of Dali’s choosing for 3,000 francs and exhibit all his work upon his return to Paris.
But it was between these events, and not in Paris, that Dali met Gala, who would set the course of his life on a considerably different tangent.
An address I’ve come across for Dali’s original apartment in Paris is 88 Rue de l’universite, though I’m not sure of the date. It would certainly have been in the late 1920s, likely around the time “Un Chien Andalou” premiered.
The building is pictured below, facing away toward the Seine. Not far from here is Goemans Gallery.
“The Rotting Donkey” from 1928, a jumble of oil paint, sand and gravel, is on view along with the iconoclastic “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother (The Sacred Heart)” from a year later, and 1930’s “Paranoiac Woman-Horse (Invisible Sleeping Woman, Lion, Horse)” and “William Tell”, at the Musee National d’Art Moderne at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
