Dali House

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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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.

The Kunsthaus in Zurich held a Dali exhibition in 1929. Today it has his “Woman with a Head of Roses” (detail here), painted six years later, among its Dada-heavy collection. Dali had by now moved to Paris, where Miro introduced him to more of the surrealists. He was formally invited to join the group later in the year. In the photo below, Dali and Breton sit front and centre. Man Ray is at front right.

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