Tells the story of Gala Dalí, who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France’s most famous poet Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dalí in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune. At a time when artists were celebrities, Gala acted as the ambassador of the Surrealist movement, spreading its popularity across the globe.
[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.
