Dali Planet #34: The getaway
Even though his first one-man show in Paris was underway, Dali stole away with Gala to Barcelona and then the little seaside town of Sitges, seen above, too busy with their own, physical exhibition to spare a thought for anything else.
Dali confessed in his autobiography that soon after meeting Gala he felt compelled to push her off a cliff. After their first kiss, he wrote, “I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with complete hysteria, I commanded: ‘Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!’ Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered: ‘I want you to kill me!’
Dali said he was disappointed to discover that she only wanted him to do what he wanted to do already. He contemplated throwing her off the bell-tower of the Toledo Cathedral, but decided against it.
Somehow they hit it off just the same, and when Eluard and the others left Cadaques, she stayed behind while Dali finished his portrait of her husband, shown here.
Dali later confided that they first made love the following year at a hotel in the south of France “with the same speculative fanaticism that I put into my work”. Meanwhile Gala had already made the first of her countless appearances in Dali paintings, posed suggestively in profile in “The Great Masturbator”, seen below (click for a larger image).
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