Gala/Dalí: Image and Mirror

GALA / DALÍ

IMAGE AND MIRROR

MONTSE AGUER I TEIXIDOR

The Different identical 04

ELISABET RIERA

Revealed life of Gala-Salvador Dalí 06

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

True Childhood Memories 14

Oneiric dance 28

The myth of Narcissus 42

Automatic self-portraits 64

Metamorphosis 82

Check list 102

MONTSE AGUER I TEIXIDOR

The Different identical

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

04

Knowing how to look is a sort of inventing. No invention has ever been as pure as that created by the anesthetized look of the clearest eye, without eyelashes, of Zeiss.1 —Salvador Dalí

The exhibition we are presenting this year at the Gala Dalí Castle in Púbol is the result of a singular and painstakingly detailed re-reading of the extensive photographic fonds, of which Gala and Salvador Dalí are the principal subjects, the conservation of which is the proud mission of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí. On this occasion, moreover, extensive research has enabled us to relate many of the photographs in our collection with others of special interest for the study of Dalí and Gala. We extend a special thanks to Emmanuel Boussard for his invaluable collaboration, once again of the greatest importance, and to Emilia Pomés and the Museu del Joguet in Figueres. We also thank Elisabet Riera for her very valuable contribution and for her fascinating text, which has succeeded so beautifully in communicating the essence of this project, and, it goes without saying, the show’s curators, Bea Crespo and Rosa Maria Maurell, for their excellent work.

1 Salvador Dalí, ‘La fotografia, pura creació de l’esperit’, L’Amic de les Arts, year II, No. 18, 30/09/1927, Sitges, p. 90-91.

English translation by Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, 2017, p. 46.

Gala/Dalí: Image and Mirror sets out to question and rethink our perception of Gala and Salvador Dalí and fundamentally does so on the basis of photographic images, which, as we shall see, abound in striking complicities and correspondences. The layout of the exhibition follows the lives of Gala and Salvador Dalí, before and after their decisive meeting in Cadaqués in the summer of 1929, a culminating moment in their lives and careers, and at the same time allows us to establish dialogues and draw connections between the photographs that immortalize them.

We invite visitors to take part in this game of mirrors in the belief that the experience will engage them and enable them to penetrate the wreath of appearances that tends to surround Gala and Salvador Dalí. The construction of a new discourse is possible, above all, when the image – as here – is capable of transgressing conventional readings and making space for the imagination, in the broadest sense. Capable, in other words, of being the different identical.

05

The images that make up the show speak to and interrogate one another and at times, too, confuse and camouflage one another. Some inhabit the common ground of childhood, while others evoke much more than they explain. In some cases a photograph of one gives us the reflection of the other or calls into question the traditional roles of artist and muse, casting doubt on the collective memory. Dalí continually made use of photography, that ‘pure creation of the mind’, throughout his life. For the artist, photographs were not only a stimulus to reflection in their own right but also served as studio materials, as illustrations for his theoretical and literary writings, as records of art actions and above all – and Gala also comes into the picture here – as a space of thought and construction of one’s own identity.

ELISABET RIERA

Revealed life of Gala-Salvador Dalí

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

06

‘Wait – she is coming!’4: presentiments and synchronicities Time is as soft as a watch, especially for a child who liked to daydream and conjure up fantastic shapes from the shadows and reflections on his bedroom ceiling or from the patches of damp on the walls of his classroom in Figueres in the school of Mr Trayter, a teacher who frequently dozed off, and so a teacher who dreamt. Although Dalí tells us that in that first school he unlearned the little knowledge he had when he entered it – the letters of the alphabet and how to write his name – it was thanks to Mr Trayter that the first of his obsessive ideas burst upon his mind – his first fetish. In an optical theatre in the teacher’s private apartment (a kind of cabinet of curiosities, as Dalí describes it in his autobiography) the young Salvador saw reflected for the first time the little figure of a girl, whom he identified as ‘the Russian girl’:

1 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 392.

2 Ibidem.

3 Salvador Dalí, ‘La fotografia, pura creació de l’esperit’, L’Amic de les Arts, year II, No. 18, 30/09/1927, Sitges. English translation by Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, 2017, p. 47.

4 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 221.

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Some time between six and half past six in the morning of May 9, 1941, in his room at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, Salvador Dalí had a sudden idea, a revelation: ‘In pre-sleep, with my eyes shut, I would look at my eye, with my eye from the depth of my eye, and I began to “see” my eye and to consider it as a veritable soft photographic apparatus, not of the objective world but of my hard thought and of thought in general. I immediately reached conclusions which enabled me to affirm that one can photograph thought and began the theoretical bases for my invention. This invention is today an accomplished fact, and as soon as it is mechanically perfected I shall offer it for the scientific consideration of the United States. It will in fact become possible to obtain what has always appeared to be miraculous: the objective visualization of the virtual images of the thought and imagination of each individual.’1 Exultant at his discovery, he made a solemn promise to himself: ‘All the rest of my life will now be devoted to the realization and the perfecting of my invention, with the aid of the men of science with whom I shall of necessity have to collaborate.’2 Dalí’s promise to himself is prophetically fulfilled with the presentation of photographs on show here, albeit retroactively – if linear time has ever made any kind of sense in a universe of melting watches.

The intuition that photography reaches far beyond the material world had occurred to Dalí and been made public by him in a 1927 article entitled ‘Photography, pure creation of the mind’, in which he hails its ability to capture ‘the keenest and most uncontrollable poetry’, and continues: ‘Knowing how to look is a whole new System of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a sort of inventing. No invention has ever been as pure as that created by the anesthetized look of the clearest eye, without eyelashes, of Zeiss: distilled and attentive, impossible to the pink flowering of conjunctivitis.’ And he concludes: ‘Photographic fantasy; faster and more agile in its discoveries than the turbid subconscious processes! A subtle change of scale motivates unusual similarities, and existing – though undreamt-of – analogies.’3

Unusual similarities and existing analogies, however undreamt-of.

This is the true ‘secret life’ of Dalí, a life ‘revealed’ thanks to a chemical– and above all alchemical – process which is set in motion by the action of light on a surface coated with silver bromide and gives back to us, as silver itself does (and as mercury does too), an image and a mirror. The journey from the dark chamber of the subconscious to the photographic surface gives us the double autobiography of Gala-Dalí, the history of the condensation, metamorphosis and transmutation of one in the other, in a continuous game of mirrors, reflections and identities that cannot be understood in isolation, that was formed and performed even before they met. Because time is indeed as soft as a watch.

5

Ibidem, p. 41.

6

Ibidem, p. 233.

7

Ibidem, p. 218-219.

8

Ibidem, p. 40.

9

Ibidem, p. 71.

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10 Ibidem, p. 221.

‘It was in this marvellous theatre of Senor Traite that I saw the images which were to stir me most deeply, for the rest of my life; the image of a little Russian girl especially, which I instantly adored […] Was it Gala? I am certain it was.’5

What he saw was the image of a girl in white furs, in a sled that raced over the snow, pursued by wolves with phosphorescent eyes; a girl with a proud expression and a liveliness in her eyes that gave her the wild look of a woodland creature. The image was fixed so powerfully that the next day it brought on the first act of magical-paranoiac thought in the artist’s life: when he awoke the next morning, he found it was snowing, as if Figueres had become the Russian steppe. He spent hours with his cheek pressed against the windowpane! He pestered his mother to take him out in the snow: whatever it should take he was determined to go to the Font Trobada (the ‘Discovered Fountain’, a most appropriate name for the encounter with his objet trouvé).

On the way there he chanced upon a seed ball that had fallen from a plane tree, solitary and perfectly distinct on the white expanse. This seemed to him to be alive, like a little animal, a tiny monkey he picked up and carried in his hands and in his pocket. When he arrived at the fountain, there was already a girl there who was to be the first incarnation of the Russian girl. He called her his Galuchka, an embodiment or projection that was to be repeated a number of times in his childhood (Dullita, the second Dullita, Galuchka Rediviva), and of course he made her an offering of the seed ball: he gave her his desire.

‘She was destined to be my Gradiva, “she who advances”, my victory, my wife.’6 Gala was to be the one who advanced and made him advance, who was ahead of Dalí in space-time, not only because she was ten years older than he was but also because she anticipated the actions and images he would go on to reproduce without being aware of it, like a blind person following, at the end of a rope, the sighted person who leads the way. In the sequence of photographs from Dalí’s childhood and adolescence it seems that Gala was seeking him and calling to him from afar, even accompanying him, while the boy’s body was transforming into the body of a teenager and then that of a man. Gala goes through countries, husbands and lovers; she offers him anchoring objects (brothers, pets, a teddy bear, an aeroplane) [RI 01, RI 02, RI 05, RI 06, RI 07, RI 08, BO 01, BO 02], and she slowly but surely approaches until she is so close that Salvador can sense her: ‘I had a vague presentiment, which grew and became increasingly precise, that all these signs were the visceral portents of love – I was going to know love this summer! And my hands explored upon the body of the terribly precise noon of Cadaqués the absence of a feminine face which from afar was already coming toward me. This could be none other than Galuchka, resuscitated by growth, and with a new woman’s body – advancing, for I saw her always walking, always advancing.’7 In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí the artist set out to enumerate, often in footnotes to the main text, these parallels between his and Gala’s vital experience, these biographical or magical correspondences – synchronicities, as Jung called them. For example, he notes that at the same time as he was sitting on the lap of the schoolmaster Trayter, she was seated on the lap of Tolstoy, and he remarks on the physical similarity of the two men,8 and he is struck by the fact that one of his first drawings was of Helen of Troy: ‘Helen was to be the name of my wife’ [Elena Diakonova, Gala].9 Dalí encapsulates this indissoluble intuited destiny in a short exchange between his body and his soul. Salvador, tired of painting, wants to swim in the sea, but the soul never bathes; however, the body [Dalí] insists and plunges into the water, obliging the unwilling soul to accompany it: ‘“Wait – she is coming!” […] “Do not press me so,” said my soul, “you know perfectly well she is coming for you.”’10

Salvador knew it and waited. He waited, still alone, stretched out on the beach, listening to the vibrations of the air. The music of Gala.

Paranoiac thought, our ability to see in the forms of tangible reality the phantasmal image of our own desire, was operating magnificently once

again, making the ideal real, embodying the obsessive idea, which passed from being subjective to objective. At long last, at Portlligat in the summer of 1929, the soul reaches the body, her destiny, and the two shook hands: the dreamed and beloved woman became flesh, became visible. And the visible woman was Gala.

11 Works by Dalí referred to in this publication are accompanied by their number in the Catalogues Raisonnés of Works by Salvador Dalí, which is available for online consultation at https://www. salvador-dali.org/en/artwork/ catalogue-raisonne/.

12 Translated from: Paul Éluard, Max Ernst (il.), Au Défaut du silence, [1925].

Twin, double, mirror

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Salvador went out to meet her dressed all in white, his brown skin gleaming, with a string of pearls round his neck and a geranium behind his ear. He had dressed as a bride to receive his bride. The mixing of roles, genres and identities was instantaneous. Dalí’s first book as a theorist of the Surrealist movement, published barely a year after he first met Gala, was La Femme visible, written while he was working on The Invisible Man (Cat. No. P 237)11, the first of his paintings to contain a double image. Yet again, a play of double meanings and disguises, of transvestism. The book had a double cover: under the transparent outer layer of red onionskin was a second layer of aluminium foil, and inside this there was a page of silvered card which acted as a mirror reflecting a portrait of Gala with her ‘gaze that could pierce walls’,12 as Paul Éluard described it. The double image of Gala and her reflection (the invisible man, perhaps?). The dual meanings multiply: ideal-real, man-woman, absencepresence, body and soul, anima and animus, image and simulacrum.

Duplication was a presence in Dalí’s world even before he was born, with the death of his first-born elder brother. To console themselves for their loss, his parents gave this second child the same name as the first: Salvador.

The artist thus came into the world as the ‘twin’ of an absent other. Later, after his mother’s death, his father married the dead woman’s sister. What is more, Dalí’s sister Anna Maria was to be his first model, before Gala entered his life: the first woman whom he painted from behind as she looked out the window.

Up to this point the doubles are twins, substitute siblings, and they replace one another. But Gala was not Salvador’s twin. And she was also irreplaceable.

Even as a very young boy Dalí had ​​a fixation with bifurcated forms, and this made itself apparent during his first stay with the Pichot family, in their Molí de la Torre farmhouse: ‘The monster of my zoological garden was a lizard with two tails, one very long and normal and the other shorter. This phenomenon was connected in my mind with the myth of bifurcation, which appeared to me even more enigmatic when it manifested itself in a soft and living being – for the bifurcated form had obsessed me long before this. Each time chance placed me in the presence of a fine sample of bifurcation, generally offered by the trunk or the branches of a tree, my spirit remained in suspense, as if paralyzed by a succession of ideas difficult to link together, that never succeeded in crystallizing in any kind of even poetically provisional form. What was the meaning of that problem of the bifurcated line, and especially of the bifurcated object? There was something extremely practical in this problem, which I could not take hold of yet, something which I felt would be useful for life and at the same time for death, something to push with and to lean on: a weapon and a protection, an embrace and a caress, containing and at the same time contained by the thing contained. Who knows, who knows!’13

Who knows what we are, the two of us? This is the question that Gala and Salvador continually asked themselves when they met at Portlligat, where they played with objects of all kinds as they attempted to perform magic: sheets, hats and shoes were the ingredients of the formula [bo 05, bo 06, bo 07, bo 08].

Head up and head down. Now you see me and now you don’t – I disappear.

Now we are one, and now we are two. Or perhaps we are two who together make one? Are you half of me or my double? Who knows!

13 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 87.

14 Estrella de Diego, Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own at Púbol, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2018, p. 162.

15 Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1937, p. [28].

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16 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, La Femme visible : La dona visible. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Edicions i propostes culturals Andana, Figueres, Vilafranca del Penedès, 2011, p. 160.

The German Romantic novelist Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) initiated the literary tradition of the doppelgänger, which has taken root in the artistic and literary imaginary in a variety of forms (such as Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ or Maupassant’s ‘He?’) right up to the present day. The doppelgänger, ‘the one who walks beside us’, is an instance of the myth that somewhere in the world each of us has an exact but evil double, the encounter with whom usually augurs death, so that to see one’s own image in any form (as in a mirror) can be genuinely frightening. The doppelgänger may be the literary manifestation of the Jungian concept of the shadow, and in that sense it would coincide with the idea some people have entertained of a grasping, sinister Gala who manipulated a weak-willed Dalí and caused him to break with his family and friends. But no, Gala was not Salvador’s doppelgänger, and neither was Salvador Gala’s.

If we follow the tracks of the ‘life revealed’ in the photographs, which are more truthful than all the words, we arrive at a pair of central, foundational images, as clear as water: the doubled image of Narcissus. In a photograph taken in Switzerland in 1929 [mn 01], Gala is seen in the exact same posture as the figure of the young man which Dalí was to paint eight years later, in his Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Cat. No. P 455) [ir 07]. At the same time, another photograph shows Dalí reflecting on his reflection in the water in a natural landscape identical to that depicted in the painting [mn 02]. Between the two they compose the whole: figure and background, image and mirror, inseparable from each other and equally necessary to construct their mutual identity. As Estrella de Diego says: ‘Throughout those years together, one image had supported the other in the specular relationship that was not so much reflection as splitting. Gala and Dalí had split each other endlessly and exchanged identities: they look like one and are the other.’14 Thanks to the mirror that was Gala, Dalí was able to overcome his narcissism, to break free of himself and love the other. The poem he wrote in conjunction with this painting ends on an unequivocal identification: ‘Gala, my narcissus.’15 A fundamental part of the alchemical process had already taken place: the dissolution and condensation of subject and object, male and female, heaven and earth, matter and spirit. Result: the couple with their feet on the ground and head in the clouds [mn 15].

The alchemical androgyne in search of gold Gala was already Narcissus, and Salvador was already signing his works as Gala-Dalí. Their souls were superimposed on one another like photographic double-exposures [aa 09, aa 10, aa 11, aa 12]. They were ready to undertake the great work of every alchemist: to make gold, in its double meaning, both material and spiritual. They worked together on the Dream of Venus Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair, and on the writing and correction of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí [mm 02, mm 03, mm 04, mm 05]. They were inseparable, indissoluble, artist and model one and indivisible, like the figure of the androgyne.

The fusion was not only physical, it was total: ‘Everything that I think lives and is renewed in the image of the beloved being. This being is also everything that I can think and everything that I will never think.’16 All the facts and all the possibilities are present in the figure of the Gala-Dalí androgyne: they are objects and subjects of a work that is done on one’s own life and on our own body, as when Salvador painted Medusa of Dream on Gala’s forehead [mm 06].

The concept of the androgyne, also known as the Rebis or dual nature, is a recurring figure in the alchemical tradition which Dalí found so fascinating, and his personal library contained a number of works on this subject. His 1976 artist’s book Alchimie des philosophes brings together a

17 Salvador Dalí, Louis Pauwels, The Passions according to Dalí, The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, 1985, p. 79.

18 Salvador Dalí, André Parinaud, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, William Morrow, New York, 1976, p. 162-163.

19 Ibidem, p. 164.

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selection of alchemical writings from different periods, for which he created ten prints charged with symbols which bear witness to an in-depth study of this philosophical and mystical tradition oriented towards the purification of the spirit and the attainment of immortality. As the artist confesses in Les passions selon Dalí (1968): ‘Making of my entire life an object of alchemy, I willingly consider myself a descendant of the Catalonian, Raymond Lulle’.17 And, again, in Comment on devient Dalí (1973): ‘Every element of matter has a treasure within it. And man to me is alchemical matter par excellence: the well from which wealth must flow, the gold mine of the absolute, provided you know how to transcend it. Gold is the true proof of knowledge, of God, of the laws of life, and the deeper morality.’18 ‘All great art is born of alchemy and going beyond death. But I make gold by transcending my innards through hyperconsciousness.’19

If man is alchemical matter par excellence and all forms of great art are born of alchemy, what is the Great Work of Gala-Dalí but this being that they make up, the mythical androgyne that dissolves opposites, condenses them and distils them again and again until it transmutes them into gold (transubstantiation and light/illumination, as in the preparatory photographs for The Sacrament of the Last Supper) (Cat. No. P 719)? [mm 10, mm 11]

The last two images in the exhibition are truly ‘revealing’ [mm 14, mm 15].

We first see Salvador and Gala together, in the Oval room at Portlligat, just like the alchemical forces of life inside an egg. Dalí is dressed in a costume adorned with a blazing golden sun surrounded by stars: a whole firmament. This is the figure of the Magus or Magician card in the tarot pack, which meant so much to Gala, who consulted it so often throughout her life. In Salvador Dalí’s tarot pack, he explicitly embodies the magician, seated on his throne while Gala, at his feet, looks more like a page or a fairy. This is the ultimate mirage.

The last photo finally reveals one of the greatest secrets of the androgynous couple: Gala, emerging from the shadows, has assumed Salvador’s solar (and therefore golden) costume. Because, in the end, in this game of images we have been collecting, Gala has passed through to the other side of the mirror; it is she that is the transforming agent, the alchemist, the mage.

GALA / DALÍ

IMAGE AND MIRROR

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

True Childhood Memories

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

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1

I shut my eyes and I turn my mind to my most distant memories in order to see the image that will appear to me most spontaneously, with the greatest visual vividness, in order to evoke it as the first and inaugural image of my true remembrances.

I see ...2 —Salvador Dalí

1 The title of chapter 5 of the artist’s autobiography gives its name to this section. See: Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942.

2

Ibidem, p. 63.

3

Ibidem, p. 75.

4

Ibidem, p. 43.

5

Ibidem, p. 229.

6 During the 1920s, the teddy bear Don Osito Marquina, so named

by Federico García Lorca, was the subject of games and jokes by its owners, Salvador and Anna Maria Dalí, and the poet. For further information see Els vint primers anys de Salvador Dalí, Museu del Joguet de Catalunya, Figueres, 2004, pp. 21-26.

7 Dalí stuck a photo of himself as a boy on top of an image of the monastery complex of El Escorial, outside Madrid, and a photo of Gala as a girl over a picture of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

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Among the childhood memories that Salvador Dalí recounted in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), is this vivid recollection of Dullita: ‘It was a little girl whom I saw one day from behind, walking in front of me the whole length of the street, on my way home from school. She had a waist so slender and so fragile that it seemed to separate her body into two independent parts and her extremely arched manner of walking threatened to break her in two.’3 Dullita, whose face Dalí was unable to see, merges with the memory of Galuchka, the little Russian girl he had seen, or thought he had seen – childhood memories are often elusive – inside the magical theatre of his schoolteacher, Mr Trayter. Galuchka, whose name in the story is a clear allusion to Gala, corresponds to the same female image that, according to Dalí, repeated itself throughout the course of his love life and fed both his false and his true memories.4

Different Dullitas and Galuchkas succeed one another throughout the book until Gala Éluard finally makes her appearance – also seen from behind – in the summer of 1929: ‘It was her! Galuchka Rediviva! I had just recognized her by her bare back. Her body still had the complexion of a child’s. Her shoulder blades and the sub-renal muscles had that somewhat sudden athletic tension of an adolescent’s.’5 Gala, the girl-woman, embodies the fetish-person that Dalí had recreated and reinvented so many times in his childhood and can be seen in this new light in the earliest photographs we have of her. Gala, who was also Dullita and Galuchka, at last turned her elusive face towards the image of Dalí, the boy – and not so much a boy – who had imagined her and dreamt her even before they first met.

The journey through the portraits and memories of Gala and Salvador Dalí’s childhood and youth, prior to the encounter that was to mark a before and an after in their lives, abounds in astonishing analogies. In the photographs we see children dressed in their Sunday best [RI 01, RI 02], earnest young scholars with a distracted air [RI 03, RI 04], beloved childhood friends [RI 05, RI 06], toy animals stuffed full of stories6 [RI 07, RI 08] and eyes that gaze into infinity at the precise moment when a young person eager to experience life shines with an inner light [RI 09, RI 10]. Considered together, these images attest to the weight of convention in the portrait photography of the period and also, in a way, alert us to a stratagem Dalí employed in laying out the illustrated pages of his autobiography [ir 01, ir 02]: he juxtaposed photographs of Gala and himself with pictures of architectural complexes to evoke relationships that were of special significance in their respective childhoods,7 and a portrait of Gala as a young woman with a view of the landscape of Cadaqués because he perceived in both the same ‘aura of eternity’.

RI 01

RI 02

RI 03

RI 04

RI 05

SD + GOS

RI 06

RI 07

RI 08

RI 09

RI 10

IR 01

IR 02

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

Oneiric dance

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

28

In pre-sleep, with my eyes shut, I looked at my eyes with my eyes from the depth of my eyes, and I started to see my eyes and to think of them as a genuine soft photographic device, not of the objective world, but of my hard thought and of thought in general.1 —Salvador Dalí

Photography, seizing the keenest and most uncontrollable poetry!2 —Salvador Dalí

1 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 392.

2 Salvador Dalí, ‘La fotografia, pura creació de l’esperit’, L’Amic de les Arts, year II, No. 18, 30/09/1927, Sitges. English translation by Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, 2017, p. 47.

3 In a letter Dalí sent to Federico García Lorca, dated early September 1928, the artist declares his faith in Surrealism, which he considers the only possible means of escape. See: Querido Salvador, querido Lorquito: Epistolario 19251936, Elba, Barcelona, 2013, p.

150.

4 Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Michel Poivert, ‘Changer la vue’, in La Subversion des images : surréalisme, photographie, film, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009, p. 17.

5 Marc Aufraise, Salvador Dalí et la photographie: portraits du surréalisme (1927-1942), PhD thesis, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, 2013, p.

215-216.

6 In 1935, Les Éditions surréalistes published Dalí’s book La Conquête de l’irrationnel, in which the artist set out the bases of his paranoiac-critical method of interpreting reality.

7 An allusion to a quote by Breton: ‘Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.’ Translated from: André Breton, L’Amour fou, Gallimard, Paris, 1937, p. 26.

8 Man Ray’s great talent as a photographer enabled Dalí to intensify the impact of his phantasmagorical visions and representations.

9 Salvador Dalí, ‘Les Nouvelles couleurs du sex appeal spectral’, Minotaure, year I, No. 5, 05/1934, Paris, p. 20-22.

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At the end of the 1920s, Salvador Dalí’s artistic career and personal life were irrevocably drawn towards Surrealism.3 Under the movement’s influence, Dalí finally found a language of his own, and this was manifested both in his work, rapturous and transgressive, and in his attitude, irreverent and provocative. In part it was these qualities that were to attract several members of the Surrealist group to Cadaqués in the summer of 1929, and it was then that Dalí’s encounter with Gala, wife of the poet Paul Éluard, took place. At that decisive moment in his life the artist was intensely occupied with the preparation of what was to be his first solo exhibition in Paris, which enjoyed the positive support of André Breton, leader of the Surrealist movement.

The Surrealists, with Breton at their head, were committed to challenging conventional society and its cult of the rational mind. Influenced by the theories of the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, they championed the direct expression of the subconscious as the most powerful and authentic form of creation; hence their interest in automatism, understood as a kind of magical creation dictated by the unconscious, over which reason exerted no control. In particular, photography, as a medium of mechanical image production, occupied a unique place in the Surrealist movement and was all but omnipresent in the activities: photographs featured in and accompanied the publication of the group’s books, journals and manifestos; they were collected, exchanged and inspired texts and games.4

Among the many potential uses of the photographic apparatus, the group portrait was of special interest to the Surrealists, in that it helped them to fashion a collective identity, to affirm themselves as a group and to capture for posterity significant moments in the life of the community. Hence, for example, the readiness with which they appropriated modes and practices of popular photography such as those on offer in the amusement parks of the time [BO 01, bo 02], and their habit of taking pictures of themselves in holiday periods, which tend to be especially rich sources of collective images [BO 03, BO 04, bo 05].

It is worth noting here that many of the photographs taken by the Surrealists reflect a clear intention to subvert the established social uses of a medium that, despite appearances to the contrary, adhered to strict conventions and rigid guidelines.5 When the members of the Surrealist group appropriated these visual codes to exalt friendship and love in all its forms, they were doing so in a critical spirit, questioning social and moral norms. At the time they very often portrayed themselves in deliberately oneiric and suggestive attitudes, posing with their eyes closed, as if dreaming; for example, in the photograph which immortalized Dalí and his future Paris dealer Camille Goemans with Yvonne Bernard and Gala in Cadaqués [BO 04]. That same summer of 1929, Dalí was in the grip of ​​two dreams, both of which are projected in this image: on the one hand, his urge to take his place in the ranks of Surrealism and, on the other, his desire to unite his existence with that of Gala, whose hand he is unashamedly holding.

In fact, during the 1930s, Dalí – with Gala’s unconditional help and support – was to become one of the foremost exponents of the Surrealist spirit, and provide the group with a resource of the first importance, the paranoiaccritical method, with which he threw himself into the conquest of the irrational.6 The method aimed to bring out the subjective reality of the inner world by means of the objective elements from the external world. In other words, Dalí sought to embody his obsessive dreams and ideas in the form of a realistic representation of their constituent elements. He applied this method in his painting, of course, and it soon extended its sway to other disciplines, such as fashion design and photography, as is evident in the many numerous images from this time which reflect ideas and obsessions that were always latent in Dalí.

One product of the artist’s delirious associations was Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shoe-hat which Gala is wearing in the photograph by André Caillet [BO 08, 7 ir 02], and others include the series of veiled-erotic phantasmagoric images 8 [BO 06] photographed by Man Ray to illustrate Dalí’s Minotaure article ‘Les Nouvelles couleurs du sex appeal spectral’9 [ir 03], elements of which the artist included in his pictorial work [ir 04, ir 05].

BO 01

BO 02

BO 03

BO 04

BO 05

BO 06

IR 03

IR 03

BO 07

BO 08

IR 04

IR 05

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

The myth of Narcissus

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

42

Narcissus, you are losing your body, carried away and confounded by the millenary reflection of your disappearance.1 —Salvador Dalí

2 The artist declared that he was a virgin when he first met Gala: ‘Never in my life had I yet “made love,” and I represented this act to myself as terribly violent and disproportionate to my physical vigor — “this was not for me.” See: Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 242.

3 Estrella de Diego, Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own at Púbol, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2018, p. 151.

4 Both the poem and the painting represent a reworking of the myth of Narcissus as recounted by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Although Dalí only dealt with the myth on this one occasion, his work frequently returns to the theme of love and death, Eros and Thanatos.

5 Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, op. cit., p. [28].

6 In this photograph, one of a series that Cecil Beaton made of the couple in 1936, we see Gala posing next to A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (Cat. No. P 443), painted that same year. Works by Dalí referred to in this publication are accompanied by their number in the Catalogues Raisonnés of Works

by Salvador Dalí, which is available for online consultation at: https:// www.salvador-dali.org/en/artwork/ catalogue-raisonne/.

7 David Lomas, ‘Sobre el Narcisismo en Dalí: una introducción’ in Metamorfosis de Narciso, Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores, Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Barcelona, Figueres, 2008, p. 104. Dr Lomas points in his essay to the inescapable analogy between Dalí’s painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus and the René Magritte’s painting La reproduction interdit (Not to Be Reproduced), both from 1937.

8 The print of this photograph, found among Dalí’s studio materials, has incisions on the back which suggest that it may have been used to trace the image onto other support.

9 An echo that extends beyond this particular painting. The fossilized hand holding an egg appears in another Dalí canvas, Invention of the Monsters, from c. 1937 (Cat. No. P 457).

10 It is worth recalling that themes such as illusion and self-deception are inherent in the story of Narcissus, lending further support to Dalí’s choice of this myth to launch his paranoiac-critical method.

11 Estrella de Diego, Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own at Púbol, op. cit., p. 136.

12 Ibidem, p. 134.

13 Bea Crespo, Rosa M. Maurell, ‘The Women Make Themselves Visible’, in The Women Photograph Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2018, p. 16-17.

43

1 Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1937, p. [22].

During the 1930s, Gala and Salvador Dalí often engaged in that form of photographic reciprocity in which two people portray each other in similar poses and in almost identical contexts. This is a practice so widespread that it should not surprise us, but among the series of photographs which capture Gala and Dalí in the same or a similar setting there is something that both underlies and transcends that photographic convention, beyond the mirror effect; something as incontrovertible as it is disturbing.

In order to appreciate the grounds for this assessment we must go back to the summer of 1929, when Gala arrived in Cadaqués and her presence threw Dalí into a state of considerable nervous tension and sexual agitation. It was then that the mirror of appearances to which Dalí-Narcissus, in love with himself, had been condemned was finally shattered.2 Gala was the real woman who rescued him from the abyss of his own reflection. From this moment on the artist looked at Gala and recognized himself in her and vice versa. In the words of Estrella de Diego, ‘the two nurtured a specular, Narcissistic relationship: one loved in the other what the other loved in himself or herself, and, in this exchange, identities became mingled and intermingled’.3

In effect, as the 1930s progressed the dividing line between the identities of Gala and Dalí becomes increasingly fluid. In this respect the poem Metamorphosis of Narcissus, which Dalí composed while he was working on his 1937 oil painting of the same name,4 seems to provide a highly illuminating metaphor. In the last lines of the poem the artist refers to Gala as the new Narcissus: ‘it will be the flower, the new Narcissus, Gala – my narcissus.’5 The muse acts, in fact, as the alter ego of the artist, and it is no accident that her picture appears on the cover of the first edition of the poem [ir 10].6

As for the oil painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Cat. No. P 455) [ir 07], what is surely most significant is not the reflection of Narcissus in the water but the replication or doubling of the form.7 Over and above the similarity between Gala’s pose [MN 01]8 and the posture of Narcissus in Dalí’s reconfiguring of the myth, our attention is drawn to the morphological echo of Narcissus.9 Dalí brings his paranoiac-critical method into play here to confuse us and make us see what is not there. We think we perceive Narcissus when what we are looking at is a petrified hand holding an egg out of which a daffodil or narcissus flower is growing.10

The flower and Narcissus are, like Gala and Dalí, ‘the different identical’11; they complement and have a mutual need of each other to be addressed. In this light, we perceive Gala and Dalí as a reiterated projection of one into the other. De Diego suggests that, at the time of their meeting, they were both looking for a mirror that would give them back the astonishing image of themselves they needed to keep moving forward.12 The construction of the self-image can also be seen an aspect of this search for identity. Gala and Salvador Dalí set out to make a work of art of themselves and in this endeavour the medium of photography played an essential role.

Very much aware of this, they took countless photographs of themselves during their sojourns in Cadaqués,13 in poses which are often studied, contrived [MN 03, MN 04, MN 05, MN 06, MN 07, MN 08]. Some of these pictures are outright tableaux vivants, such as the one of Dalí in the role of Narcissus on the rocks at Cap de Creus [MN 02], while others have a testimonial function, such as the separate photographs of Gala and Dalí with the work in progress Ornamental Spectre of the Erection (Cat. No. OE 18) [MN 09, MN 10]. They also took the opportunity, whenever it arose, to have themselves portrayed by prestigious professional photographers. In the splendid pictures taken by Carl Van Vechten [MN 13, MN 14], Man Ray [ir 08, ir 09] and Cecile Beaton [MN 15] we observe the features of Gala and Salvador Dalí shifting back and forth between reflection and doubling.

IR 06

IR 07

MN 01

MN 02

MN 03

MN 04

MN 05

MN 06

MN 07

MN 08

MN 09

MN 10

MN 11

MN 12

MN 13

MN 14

IR 08

IR 09

MN 15

IR 10

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

Automatic self-portraits

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

64

The mere fact of photographic transposition already implies a total invention: the capturing of an UNKNOWN REALITY.1 —Salvador Dalí

Every photographic double exposure inevitably has a prophetic meaning.2 —Salvador Dalí

1 Salvador Dalí, ‘La dada fotogràfica’, Gaseta de les Arts, II, No. 6, 02/1929, Barcelona. English translation by Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, 2017, p. 68.

2 Salvador Dalí quoted in Robert Descharnes, The world of Salvador Dalí, Macmillan, London, 1962, p. 29.

3 The literary practice of writing down the stream of words that presents itself without attempting to exercise conscious control over them.

4 Clément Chéroux, ‘L’automatisme’, en Derrière le rideau: L’esthétique Photomaton, Musée de l’Élysée, Éditions Photosynthèses, Lausanne & Arles, 2012, p. 93.

5 Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, La Révolution surréaliste, year 5, No. 12, 15/12/1929, Paris, p. 73.

6 On the importance of the concept of the group for André Breton’s Surrealists see: Fèlix Fanés, ‘Au Rendez-vous des amis’, in Salvador Dalí: Álbum de familia, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Fundació “la Caixa”, Figueres, Barcelona, 1998, pp. 6-13.

7 ‘The problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem there is in the world’, André Breton declared in the Second manifeste du surréalisme (1929).

See: André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p. 180.

8 The reference her is to the artist Valentine Hugo and in particular to two of her works: Les Surréalistes (also known as Les Constellations), begun in 1932, and the collage Surréalisme, from 1932-1934.

9 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 301.

10 For more information on the Surrealists’ use of overprinting and double-exposure, see: Héloïse Pocry, ‘Surimpressions naturelles et volontaires chez les surréalistes. Un regard multiple sur Paris’, Articulo - Journal of Urban Research, Special issue 2, 2009.

Publ.: http://journals.openedition. org/articulo/1162 [Consulted: 10/04/2019].

65

From the moment the first photo booths were installed in Paris, in 1928, the members of the Surrealist group were fascinated by the automatism of the Photomaton. They saw the invention, which functioned like a genuine automaton, as the equivalent in the realm of the visual of the automatic writing that many of them had been practising since 1924.3 If automatic writing gave expression to a kind of interior monologue, the photomaton provided a tangible representation of the idea we construct of ourselves on the basis of our reflection in the mirror.4

It did not take long for the Surrealists, with their enthusiasm for selfrepresentation, to appropriate this modern version of the confessional, which allows us, on payment of a few coins, to play with our identity. As early as 1929 their occasional journal La Révolution surréaliste published the composite photo-booth portraits of sixteen Surrealists with their eyes closed, forming a border around an image by René Magritte, Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt [ir 11].5 Here once again, an official photograph reflects the need of the group to affirm its collective existence and present itself to the world as a tightly cohesive unit by parading its members at that particular moment.6

And it was precisely through his presence in this photo gallery that Salvador Dalí was introduced into society as a member of the collective [AA 02]; a collective which was, of course, to all intents and purposes exclusively male. We should not forget that ‘woman’ was regarded in the very origins of Surrealism as a ‘problem’,7 and as such relegated to the roles of muse, inspiration and lover. Although this stance was corrected to some extent as the Thirties advanced, women continued to be excluded from the group portraits, and even from group portraits which were created by a woman.8 As for Gala, a highly cultured, creative and influential woman, she chose to remain in the background and there cultivate a role – that of the enigmatic muse – which ennobled her but at the same time limited her. On the private rather than the public level she considered herself a member of the Surrealist group, as her photo-booth portrait with her eyes closed, which could have been included in the Magritte composite photo, seems to demonstrate [AA 01].

While posing for a self-portrait with eyes closed implies a measure of restraint on the part of the subject, the fact is that in the photo booth, screened behind the curtain, the Surrealists, and Gala and Salvador Dalí among them, display an uninhibited readiness to experiment with their image. From one flash to the next, the self in continual mutation regales us with eternal smiles [AA 03, aa 04], masks [AA 06], mysteries [AA 05] and moments of tender intimate rapport [AA 07, aa 08]. Behind the appearance of a mere divertimento, some of these self-portraits can be taken as a declaration of intention: where Dalí decides to disguise himself as Dalí, Gala – essentially elusive – turns her back on the camera and, in an unusual gesture, hides her face [AA 05, aa 06].

In addition to the photo-booth pictures we have a series of doubleexposed photographs of Gala and Salvador Dalí from the 1930s which by their nature can also be thought of as automatic self-portraits. The couple took one of these double-exposures during a sojourn in Cadaqués. In the passing of the camera to and fro between them, Gala forgot to wind on the film and accidentally superimposed a shot of the artist on one of herself. The resulting image is fascinating because it makes visible the amorous fusion the two experienced in the early 1930s [AA 09], something Dalí expresses vehemently in his autobiography: ‘Gala and I lived for three months steadily in Port Lligat, stuck like two cancers, one in the stomach, the other in the throat, of time. We did not want a fraction of an hour to flow by without having consumed the life of all its tissues in our devouring embrace’ [ir 12].9

Whether by chance [AA 10] or from caprice [AA 11, aa 12],10 the doubleexposed photographs of the couple give poetic form to an open secret: Gala lived in Dalí in the same way that Dalí lived in Gala, and the two made up a third persona which at once includes them and transcends them.

IR 11

AA 01

AA 02

AA 03

AA O4

AA 05

AA 06

AA 07

AA 08

AA 09

AA 10

AA 11

AA 12

IR 12

BEA CRESPO / ROSA MARIA MAURELL

Metamorphosis

GALA / DALÍ: IMAGE AND MIRROR

82

I am the portrait of myself. I am the nude Vu de Dos. I am the Homer’s Apotheosis, and I am The Bread Basket.1 —Gala

My metamorphosis is tradition, because tradition is precisely change and the reinvention of a new skin.2 —Salvador Dalí

1 Statement ascribed to Gala in: Salvador Dalí, ‘The Vernissage of Gala Salvador Dalí’s Exhibition at the Bignou Gallery is taking place now’, Dalí News, 20/11/1945, New York, p. 4. The works referred to are the paintings My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture (Cat. No. P 598), Apotheosis of Homer (Diurnal Dream of Gala), (Cat. No. P 600) and Basket of Bread (Cat. No. P 607).

2 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, Hommage à Meissonier, Hotel Meurice, Paris, 1967. [Exhibition catalogue].

3 See the catalogue of the recent exhibition in Barcelona: Estrella de Diego, Gala Salvador Dalí.

A Room of One’s Own at Púbol, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2018.

4 ‘Gala’, in The Women Photograph Dalí, Figueres, Fundació-Gala Salvador Dalí, 2018, pp. 20-33.

5 Salvador Dalí, André Parinaud, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1976, p. 243.

6 De Diego envisages Gala as an artist without a work, a dilettante whose creation – which is more process than product – was her own person. See: Estrella de Diego, Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own at Púbol, op. cit., p. 150.

7 A project conceived by Dalí for the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

8 Lucia Moni refers to this costume and its significance to the artist in her article ‘Dalí e i Mass Media, l’affermazione del personaggio’. See: Io Dalí, Gangemi, Rome, 2018, pp. 66-68.

83

The collective memory tends to load Gala and Salvador Dalí with the respective roles of enigmatic muse and genius artist, which they performed perfectly throughout their life together and, above all, in front of the mass media [MM 01]. But what are we to make of the photographs that confront us with the picture of a Gala actively committed to Dalí’s creative process? Or those that give us an image of Dalí as a model for one of his own works? On the one hand, it becomes clear that the personal and creative relationship that united them was more complex and richer in nuances than historiography has led us to believe. On the other, we can see that both Gala and Salvador Dalí excel in the devious arts of camouflage and disguise.

Thanks to the most recent studies of Gala,3 we now understand that from the very beginning of her relationship with Dalí her role – or roles – went far beyond those of wife, model and muse. She immediately becomes the artist’s right hand, taking charge of their affairs so as to leave him free to dedicate himself exclusively to creating: she organized his agenda, acted as his representative and dealt with the practicalities of exhibitions, publications and artistic projects of all kinds. With Dalí, she also revealed herself to be both cultivated and creative, writing, taking photographs,4 making surrealist objects, contributing to the creation of exquisite corpses and in some cases involving herself in the material realization of Dalí’s ideas.

At the beginning of the Thirties Dalí was already acknowledging Gala’s involvement and her importance in his work, and signing many of his paintings with the joint name ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’, a decision he was to explain many years later, in The Unspeakable Confessions, originally published in French in 1973: ‘In signing my paintings Gala-Dalí, all I did was to give a name to an existential truth, since without my twin Gala I would no longer exist.’5 Estrella de Diego takes this truth a step further when she points out that behind the double signature was a form of creative collaboration in which Gala exercised real agency in the construction of her own image through the medium of Salvador Dalí’s brush.6

The reality is that the so-called muse was at all times in a position to decide how she was to be depicted, with complete control over her image, and this determination is manifested in the works in which Salvador Dalí represented her. In the many drawings and paintings in which she appears she offers an image of herself that is always different, and in this we intuit a search for identity, or rather a masking of identity, which is also very apparent in Salvador Dalí. In some sense, Gala was inventing herself through the eyes of the artist, while he in turn was seeking and looking at himself in Gala, his other half.

Photographs also have a part to play in this dance of identities. In the images that shape this last section we see how Gala and Salvador Dalí shape-shifted at will, changing places with one another in the course of a photo session. While the artist is presented as a model [MM 09], posing for works such as The Ecumenical Council (Cat. No. 770) [MM 13], the muse disguises herself as a writer and a craftsman. We see her taking an active part in the creation of the Dream of Venus pavilion [MM 02],7 revising the manuscript of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) [MM 04] and acting as a medium and canvas in a number of Dalí’s art actions [MM 06, mm 07].

At times the artist and the muse merge so completely as to confound the observer. Especially disconcerting in this sense are the photographs of Gala and Salvador Dalí posing for the 1955 painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper, (Cat. No. 719). Almost as if we were in the grip of critical paranoia, we believe we are looking at Dali’s outstretched arms when in fact the arms are Gala’s, and vice versa [MM 10, mm 11]. It is hard to be sure to what extent they are inventing and influencing one another in each of their metamorphoses. In this regard, the unpublished photograph of Gala in the same costume as the artist [MM 14, mm 15] seems like nothing less than a declaration of intentions.8 The muse, dressed as the sun (or rather, as the sky), claims her rightful place, above and beyond the Dalinian universe that eclipses and exalts her in equal parts. Gala reveals herself as the creator, no less than Dalí, of her own myth.

MM 01

MM 02

MM 03

MM 04

MM 05

MM 06

MM 07

MM 08

MM 09

MM 10

MM 11

MM 12

MM 13

IR 13

IR 14

MM 14

MM 15

IMAGE AND MIRROR

Check lisT

GALA / DALÍ

102

RI 09

Gala* s. d.

Period copy 11.4 x 8.2 cm

Gala* 1910s Period copy 13.3 x 8.4 cm

NR 4058

NR 4059

NR 9042

RI 06

RI 10

Salvador Dalí in the garden of the Pichot family house, Figueres 1909 Modern copy Museu del Joguet de Catalunya

Salvador Dalí* 1925 Modern copy 17.7 x 11.6 cm

RI 02

Salvador Dalí Domènech and his sister Anna Maria 1909 Modern copy Museu del Joguet de Catalunya

IR 01 RI 07

RI 03

Gala* s. d.

Period copy 10.2 x 6.3 cm NR 4812

Gala in Paul Éluard’s room in the Clavadel sanatorium, Switzerland 1913 Period copy 7.2 x 7.5 cm NR 4819

RI 04

Signature illegible Salvador Dalí* c. 1911 Modern copy 21.6 x 18 cm NR 4468

NR 4647

RI 08

Joan Xirau Salvador Dalí and Anna Maria with Don Osito Marquina in the artist’s studio, Figueres c. 1924 Modern copy Emília Pomés Archives

Illustrated page from Salvador Dalí’s autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942 NR 15920 IR 02

Illustrated page from Salvador Dalí’s autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942 NR 15920

* Photographs marked with an asterisk are modern prints, not the originals, which are not displayed for conservation reasons.

Images marked with the abbreviation IR are for reference only, and are not part of the exhibition.

103

RI 05

Gala [Elena Diakonova] with her siblings Lidia, Vadim and Nikolai c. 1904 Period copy 11.5 x 16.8 cm

True Childhood Memories

RI 01

104

Oneiric dance

BO 01

BO 05

BO 08

André Breton, Robert Desnos, Joseph Delteil, Paul Éluard, Gala, Max Morise, Max Ernst and Simone Breton at the fair in Montmartre, Paris c. 1923 Period copy 9 x 13 cm

Gala and René Crevel at Portlligat* 1932 Period copy 8.5 x 5.8 cm

Caillet fils Gala with Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shoe-hat inspired by a Salvador Dalí design 1938 Period copy 23 x 28.6 cm

NR 4321 BO 02

Salvador Dalí and Anna Maria on the fair in Girona* c. 1928 Modern copy Archivo Emília Pomés BO 03

Salvador Dalí at Portlligat* c. 1927 Period copy 8.4 x 5.9 cm NR 5158 BO 04

Camille Goemans, Gala, Salvador Dalí and Yvonne Bernard in Cadaqués 1929 Period copy 10.6 x 8.2 cm NR 3999

NR 4705 BO 06

Man Ray Dalí drapé 1933 Period copy 17.2 x 11.3 cm NR 9551

NR 5230 IR 04

Salvador Dalí Ambivalent Image c. 1932 André-François Petit collection, Paris

IR 03

Salvador Dalí «Les Nouvelles couleurs du sex appeal spectral», Minotaure, 05/1934, Paris NR 74425 BO 07

Man Ray Salvador Dalí hanging upside down at Portlligat 1933 Period copy 23 x 18.1 cm NR 4522

IR 05

Salvador Dalí Figure and Drapery in a Landscape 1935 Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

MN 07

MN 11

IR 08

Gala at Portlligat c. 1930 Period copy 8.5 x 6 cm

Salvador Dalí René Crevel and Gala with Benvingut and Honori Costa, sons of Lídia Noguer i Sabà, Cap de Creus c. 1931 Period copy 8.5 x 5.4 cm

Gala c. 1938 Period copy 13 x 9 cm

Promotional insert for Salvador Dalí’s book La Femme visible, Éditions Surréalistes, Paris, 1930

NR 4269

NR 30573

MN 12

IR 09

Salvador Dalí c. 1938 Period copy 8.2 x 6 cm

Time, 14/12/1936, New York

NR 5228

NR 4193 IR 07

Salvador Dalí Metamorphosis of Narcissus 1937 Tate Modern, Londres

MN 04

Salvador Dalí at Portlligat c. 1930 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

MN 01

Gala at Arosa, Switzerland* c. 1929 Period copy with incision 10.9 x 6.7 cm

MN 05

NI 5372

Gala and a crab 1930-1933 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

MN 02

MN 06

Salvador Dalí in Punta dels Tres Frares in the Gallardera cove, Cap de Creus c. 1948 Period copy 9 x 8.8 cm

Salvador Dalí and a crab 1930-1933 Period copy 8.8 x 6.1 cm

NR 4009

NR 14966

NR 74861 MN 08

Gala René Crevel and Salvador Dalí with Benvingut and Honori Costa, sons of Lídia Noguer i Sabà, Cap de Creus c. 1931 Period copy 8.5 x 5.4 cm

NR 54779 MN 13

Carl Van Vechten Gala 1934 Period copy 24 x 17.3 cm

NR 74860

NR 5503

MN 09

MN 14

Salvador Dalí Gala with Salvador Dalí’s sculpture Ornamental Spectre of the Erection, at Portlligat c. 1933 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

Carl Van Vechten Salvador Dalí 1934 Period copy 24 x 17.3 cm

NR 28743 MN 15

Cecil Beaton Salvador Dalí and Gala with the artwork A Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds 1936 Period copy 22.5 x 19.3 cm NR 4694 IR 10

MN 10

Gala with Salvador Dalí’s sculpture Ornamental Spectre of the Erection, at Portlligat* c. 1933 Period copy 8,7 x 6,1 cm NR 14954

NR 5483

Salvador Dalí Métamorphose de Narcisse, Éditions Surréalistes, Paris, 1937 NR 23761

105

MN 03

Salvador Dalí painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus c. 1936-1937

The myth of Narcissus

IR 06

106

Automatic self-portraits

IR 11

AA 04

AA 08

AA 12

Collage Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, published in La Révolution surréaliste, 15/12/1929, Paris

Self-portrait of Salvador Dalí in a photomaton c. 1929 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

Self-portrait of Gala and Salvador Dalí in a photomaton c. 1929 Period copy 5 x 3.7 cm

Henri Manuel Double-exposure of Gala and Salvador Dalí* 1935-1937 Period copy 23.9 x 17.8 cm

NR 24873

NR 14989

NR 4975

AA 05 AA 01

Self-portrait of Gala in a photomaton c. 1929 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard AA 02

Self-portrait of Salvador Dalí in a photomaton for the collage Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt c. 1929 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard AA 03

Self-portrait of Gala in a photomaton c. 1929 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

Self-portrait of Gala in a photomaton c. 1929 Modern copy Bibliothèque Emmanuel Boussard

AA 09

AA 06

NR 4296

Self-portrait of Salvador Dalí in a photomaton* c. 1929 Period copy 3.5 x 3.6 cm NR 3976 AA 07

Self-portrait of Gala and Salvador Dalí in a photomaton c. 1929 Period copy 5 x 3.7 cm NR 14988

Double-exposure of Gala and Salvador Dalí at Portlligat c. 1930 Period copy 8.3 x 5.7 cm

AA 10

Double-exposure of Gala and Salvador Dalí at Portlligat* c. 1930 Period copy 8.4 x 5.9 cm NR 6510 AA 11

Double-exposure of Gala and Salvador Dalí in the swimming pool of Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt at the Vila Reale di Marlia, Italy 1936 Period copy 10.1 x 9.2 cm NR 4291

IR 12

Salvador Dalí Illustration for The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí 1939-1941 Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

MM 08

MM 11

IR 14

Eric Schaal Salvador Dalí writing The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí in Caresse Crosby’s house, Hampton Manor, Virginia 1941 Period copy 24.2 x 19.2 cm

Melitó Casals «Meli» Salvador Dalí. Preparatory photograph for the artwork The Sacrament of the Last Supper c. 1955 Period copy 15.7 x 23.9 cm

Bill Schropp Contact sheet of Gala and Salvador Dalí posing Detail 1960s

MM 02

NR 5490

Julian P. Graham Gala in the studio in Coronel Harold Mack’s hacienda, Monterrey. Preparatory photograph for the artwork The Madonna of Portlligat c. 1947 Period copy 25.2 x 20.4 cm

NR 9919

MM 14

Eric Schaal Gala working on the interior of the Dream of Venus pavilion for the New York World’s Fair 1939 Period copy 25.3 x 20.5 cm NR 11893 MM 03

Eric Schaal Salvador Dalí painting one of the interior murals of the Dream of Venus pavilion 1939 Period copy 21,5 20,7 cm NR 11836 MM 04

Pictorial Press Gala correcting The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí in Caresse Crosby’s house, Hampton Manor, Virginia 1941 Modern copy Alamy Stock Photos

NR 8438 MM 06

MM 12

Philippe Halsman Salvador Dalí paints Medusa of Dream on Gala’s forehead in the St. Regis Hotel in New York 1942 Period copy 34.4 x 27.4 cm

MM 09

NR 6658

NR 4732

MM 07

MM 10

Bettmann Gala compressing Dalí’s eyeballs with perfumed cushions to stimulate his creative process. Photograph published in The Sketch, 20/05/1942, London 1942 Modern copy Getty images

Melitó Casals «Meli» Gala. Preparatory photograph for the artwork The Sacrament of the Last Supper c. 1955 Period copy 15.8 x 23.9 cm

Julian P. Graham Salvador Dalí in the studio in Coronel Harold Mack’s hacienda, Monterrey c. 1947 Period copy 25.2 x 20.4 cm

NR 9080

Gala. Preparatory photograph for the artwork The Ecumenical Council c. 1960 Modern copy 18 x 18 cm NR 6867 MM 13

Salvador Dalí. Preparatory photograph for the artwork The Ecumenical Council c. 1960 Period copy 13 x 10.2 cm NR 5238 IR 13

Bill Schropp Contact sheet of Gala and Salvador Dalí posing 1960s NR 5337

NR 5337

Oriol Maspons / Julio Ubiña Salvador Dalí and Gala in the Oval room at Portlligat 1961 Period copy 18 x 17.4 cm NR 9174 MM 15

Gala* 1960s Period copy 15.4 x 16.8 cm NR 10612

107

MM 05

Eric Schaal Salvador Dalí drawing Gala in the studio at Hampton Manor, Virginia 1941 Modern copy Alamy Stock Photos

Metamorphosis

MM 01

ExHIBITION

Catalogue

Copyrights

Scientific direction Montse Aguer

Edition Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Texts of Salvador Dalí: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019

Curators Bea Crespo Rosa M. Maurell

Authors Montse Aguer Bea Crespo Rosa M. Maurell Elisabet Riera

Coordinator House-Museum Gala-Dalí Castle Púbol Jordi Artigas Design Pep Canaleta, 3carme33 Exhibition graphics Alex Gifreu Restauration and conservation department Elisenda Aragonés Irene Civil Laura Feliz Josep Maria Guillamet Assembly Roger Ferré Ferran Ortega Registrar Rosa Aguer Communication Imma Parada Web and social networks Cinzia Azzini Insurance AON Gil y Carvajal, S.A. Barcelona

With the sponsorship of

Documentation Centre d’Estudis Dalinians Coordination Bea Crespo Rosa M. Maurell with the support of Fiona Mata Rights management Mercedes Aznar Graphic design Alex Gifreu Fotografia Gasull Fotografia, S.L. Translations Eduard Escoffet Marielle Lemarchand Graham Thomson

Texts: His authors Image of Salvador Dalí: Image rights of Salvador Dalí reserved.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 Alamy Stock Photos © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s Caillet Fils © Melitó Casls “Meli” / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 Getty Images Julian P. Graham © Halsman Archive © Man Ray Trust, VEGAP, Girona, 2019 Henri Manuel © Maspons-Ubiña / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 Pictorial Press Eric Schaal © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 Bill Schropp Carl Van Vechten Joan Xirau

THANKs Josep Maria Joan i Rosa Eva Pascual Emmanuel Boussard Guillaume Injert Emília Pomés

IMAGE AND MIRROR

GALA / DALÍ