Dali Planet #36: Love and anger
By the time Dali moved into the apartment at 7 rue Becquerel that Paul Eluard had leased for Gala — with a view of the Montmartre windmills that would have thrilled Cervantes — his father was furious over the affair and banished him from the family homes permanently. (Papa could not have been happy, either, about his son’s scrawling the words “Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother” on a lithograph of the Sacred Heart he’d found and then putting it in a show.) Dali responded to his father’s wrath by painting “Accommodations of Desire”, seen above: The angry lion is his father, the vulva made of ants is Dali’s fear of impotence.
Gala and Eluard divorced in 1932 and she married Dali two years later in a civil ceremony in Paris, a church service waiting another 26 years — until after Eluard died.
Art critic Robert Hughes described Gala as a “very nasty and very extravagant harpy”, but Dali was completely dependent on her, saying he would go insane if she ever left him. On another occasion he said that, other than himself, only she was capable of “moderating and exalting my divine madness”. She was his “Angel of Equilibrium”.
“She is the rarest being to see,” he said, “the superstar who cannot in any case be compared with La Callas or Greta Garbo, because one may see them often, whereas Gala is an invisible being, the anti-exhibitionist par excellence.”
