[Klein] relishes illustrating the power dynamics at play in burgeoning art scenes ... While Gala Dalí comes off as fascinating and enigmatic, Gerber Klein makes it clear that her subject was willfully unknowable.
Klein documents Gala’s role in Dalí’s career in great detail, and yet her biography disappoints because it fails to give the reader an in-depth psychological portrait of her subject ... What’s missing from this book, apart from illustrations of Dalí’s art, is penetration of Gala’s character beneath the surface glamor of her life among the Western world’s privileged upper class.
Klein portrays Gala with exceptional fluidity, detailing the nuances of emotions, relationships, and artistic breakthroughs in a captivating, luminary-filled, grandly clarifying appreciation of an essential yet long-cloaked figure in twentieth-century art.
