Art Review: Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own in Púbol.

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The exhibition currently at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), ostensibly a celebration of the life and accomplishments of Gala Dalí, wife of the celebrated Catalan Surrealist artist, tries hard not to be a show about Salvador Dalí. It doesn’t entirely succeed because it is burdened with the long shadow cast by one of the 20th century’s most brilliant technicians. The galleries at the heart of the installation, in fact, form a sort of mini–museum, with many of the works on display on loan from the Museu-Teatre Salvador Dalí in his hometown of Figueres.

Surrounding that core of well-known works, including the much-reproduced 1944 painting, One Second Before Awakening From a Dream Provoked by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, are galleries that tell the story of the Russian-born woman who married Dalí and promoted his career. If this mistress/muse and wife/agent was the model for a given painting, was anywhere in the vicinity of a painting or was the one who helped sell a painting, said painting is probably in this exhibition.

The somewhat illegible text printed the walls and mirrors in the first galleries suggests that the culmination of the eccentric and colorful partnership between the Dalís was the renovation of the beautiful castle in Púbol (near the Costa Brava) that became her — not his — home in the 1970s. The story of the castle is an interesting one, and it will probably attract many more art-lovers to this tourist destination in the Empordà. But the focus on the building, rather than its inhabitants, distracts the MNAC visitor from the central theme: Gala, who was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in Kazan, Russia, in 1894. In several instances, the curators insist that she was not only brilliant and talented, which she almost certainly was, but that she was beautiful, which she was not.

What’s missing from the exhibition is a sense of how much fun these wacky, self-promoting people probably were to be around. There is one black-and-white newsreel that shows them both performing in outrageous garb designed by Dalí, as well as an enticing series of photos of their joint installation at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. But otherwise we must accept Gala as a fashion icon — and it is fun to see, among other bits of haute couture, the Elsa Schiaparelli “shoe” that she wore on her head — and as an artists’ agent. (Did fellow Surrealist painter Giorgio De Chirico follow through on his offer to hire her to represent him? We do not learn the answer here.)

Was she a gold-digger or a brilliant artist in her own right? There is no evidence that she ever picked up a paintbrush, although her husband signed many of his works with both of their names. Her greatest talent seemed to be identifying and romancing talented young men, like American painter Max Ernst, French poet Paul Eluard (whom she also married in 1918) and of course Salvador Dalí. A video toward the end of the exhibition sheds the most light on her motivation. Like a traditional Russian wife, she saw her role as to stand by her man and to make sure that his needs were met. Along the way, she acknowledged, she would like to be remembered “as a legend.” And with the MNAC show, so she is.