When Your Muse is Also a Demonic Dominatrix
July 11, 2018 7:07 PM   Subscribe

 
I have to say that I didn't know much about Gala, and whew!
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:10 PM on July 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's always fun to tell people that blank canvas story.

I always considered "Dali" to be the artistic creation of Gala, myself.

Also everyone needs to stop and read Dali's autobiography. There's a footnote explaining how a whole chapter was just the name Gala written over and over in various permutations and patterns.
posted by The Whelk at 7:18 PM on July 11, 2018 [13 favorites]


Well how unpleasant could she really—
Described as “cruel, fierce and small” and having “eyes that pierced walls,” she collected stuffed toys but once cooked her own pet rabbit.
I see.

And then she turns out to be mother and muse? This is bananas and fascinating.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:21 PM on July 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


>“an appetizing little body, and the libido of an electric eel.”

I am completely unable to interpret this. What kind of libido does an electric eel have?
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:28 PM on July 11, 2018 [7 favorites]


A shocking one.
posted by overglow at 7:43 PM on July 11, 2018 [53 favorites]


Someone was wondering the same thing 5 years ago here, on the blue. (found this while googling to find the answer!)
posted by vert canard at 7:44 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]




Great find, more of this please!

The more I learn about women without shame, the more optimistic I feel about the world. Somehow I think shameless women will be our salvation.
posted by ipsative at 7:55 PM on July 11, 2018 [9 favorites]


But don't electric eels have sex with other electric eels, presumably without shocking them? Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:02 PM on July 11, 2018


I have commited to memory a poem about electric eels 0:51 - as read by Noel Edmonds
posted by freethefeet at 8:10 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is a relationship far beyond my understanding and most people's definition of acceptable, and yet it appears to have worked.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:16 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


How does a relationship like this work out uh, "happily" for decades and yet I couldn't find someone I could be interested in and have them be interested in back even if I sold my soul to the devil?

Just wondering.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:39 PM on July 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


jenfullmoon, they say there's a lid for every pot, and we ain't pots.
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:20 PM on July 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


iirc, she featured in Jim Carroll's story about the time Salvador stole a NYC cab from him.
posted by thelonius at 10:10 PM on July 11, 2018


they say there's a lid for every pot, and we ain't pots.

Good point, I'm probably one of these things.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:52 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


Some think he never even had sex with Gala and just got off on watching her have sex with other people. One of his early masterpieces 'The Great Masturbator' is basically femdom by way of surrealism. Nothing wrong with a bit of kink but Dali was really ahem screwed up about sex.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:39 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


I see from a bit of googling that electric eels are not eels but knifefish, and you know what they say about knifefish...

And Dali, for that matter.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:43 AM on July 12, 2018


> GenjiandProust:
"you know what they say about knifefish."

Don't bring a knifefish to a dogfight?
posted by chavenet at 4:05 AM on July 12, 2018 [10 favorites]


"The filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who, with Dalí, made the seminal short film Un chien Andalou, got so sick of Gala’s insults that he once tried to throttle her."

Ah, yes, love when a man's violence against a woman is used as proof that that woman was a bad person.
posted by ITheCosmos at 4:41 AM on July 12, 2018 [8 favorites]


And I guess I'm still looking for the part that shows she was something other than maybe kind of an annoying, strong-willed jerk, because it seems like dude geniuses are allowed to do anything up to and including kill their wives and still be beloved eccentrics, and I'm not seeing what's shockingly beyond the pale here.

She had sex with people who were cheating on their spouses with her, it sounds like, for which I would say the guys she was sleeping with also had some responsibility. She killed and ate a rabbit, an animal that people commonly raise for food. She failed at being solely responsible for her husband's health when she herself was "almost certainly senile". This just reads like an indictment of her for not being a good enough mom to her husband.
posted by ITheCosmos at 4:58 AM on July 12, 2018 [21 favorites]


I've read a few accounts of Gala as "domineering" and "destructive" and so forth. Looking at Dali himself, especially in his later life, I always get the sense that there's a kind of displacement here.

The artist who celebrated dictators like Franco and Ceausescu, and was, by the end, pretty clearly her sort of person who romanticized authoritarian violence, is in some way absolved by projecting that into his personal life and finding an "authority" who he worshipped closer to home.

It is as if the romanticized vision of Gala that Dali wrote of and painted replaces the real woman, who in turn is made to stand in for Dali's own political turn towards feting authoritarians so that it need not be mentioned. Other artists have historically blamed Gala for Dali's overtly commercial later work, claiming that it was her spending and her desire that drove this turn in his work.

Such accounts ignore (as here) or downplay (as elsewhere) the story that Dali, late in life, beat Gala so badly that she was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hip. They say nothing of the hysterectomy she underwent in 1936 for uterine fibroids. And none cite anything of her speaking of her own views, her own politics, herself. The Gala we read about is a construct, a story about Salvador Dali or an iconic image from his work. It is worth considering how and why that story is narrated in the ways that it is, that image so specifically, purposively interpreted.
posted by kewb at 5:35 AM on July 12, 2018 [28 favorites]


And I guess I'm still looking for the part that shows she was something other than maybe kind of an annoying, strong-willed jerk, because it seems like dude geniuses are allowed to do anything up to and including kill their wives and still be beloved eccentrics, and I'm not seeing what's shockingly beyond the pale here.

Well, killing a pet (let alone eating it) is Very Bad. Abandoning a child is not good, but this was in the days before reliable birth control and the concept of childfreedom, and women are always judged more harshly than men for skipping out on parenthood obligations.

The rest, I agree, does seem overblown. In particular, elderly couples where both have dementia often get malnourished and their hygiene suffers. It's sadly common, even in the most conventional of marriages.

Killing a pet is cruel and wrong. The rest sounds informed by a lot of sexism and double standards, I agree. Even though Gala doesn't sound like a person I'd want for my friend or anything, but I wouldn't want a man like that as a friend either. ("Interesting," "bohemian" people are way overrated, IMO.)
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:38 AM on July 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Correction: Dali mocked Ceausescu, at least, but the mockery was taken as praise by the dictator himself.
posted by kewb at 5:38 AM on July 12, 2018


Other artists have historically blamed Gala for Dali's overtly commercial later work, claiming that it was her spending and her desire that drove this turn in his work.

Ah yes, the time-honored "blame his wife" strategy when one wants to excuse a man's shortcomings. Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles! Linda McCartney was too domestic and made Paul into a boring songwriter!
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:43 AM on July 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


Well, killing a pet (let alone eating it) is Very Bad. Abandoning a child is not good, but this was in the days before reliable birth control and the concept of childfreedom, and women are always judged more harshly than men for skipping out on parenthood obligations.

The rest, I agree, does seem overblown.


I mean, there's for sure a double standard for dudes vs women in how we judge their behavior. That said, the article does not make Gala sound like a very nice person, even beyond the rabbit cooking.

Her “demonic temper” asserted itself often; if she didn’t like someone’s face, she spat at them, and if she wanted to silence someone, she would stub cigarettes out on their arm. Not surprisingly, she was hugely unpopular. Women particularly disliked her. Gala was sexually voracious and had no respect for other people’s relationships.


I mean, yikes.

There have been a couple interesting books released lately - Les Dîners de Gala and The Wines of Gala. I bought the former for a chef friend and the latter for my wife. They aren't fantastic but do make decent coffee table books.
posted by lazaruslong at 5:47 AM on July 12, 2018


No interview with the cooked pet rabbit, but Amanda Lear tells the story here (amazon link). You can glimpse bits and pieces on Google Books.

An exorcized account of Dali's and Gala's relationship.

A cool looking exhibition about Gala just opened in Barcelona: Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of One’s Own in Púbol

Here's a nice pdf with some info about Gala and related Dali/Gala art.

Gala's only child, Cecile Eluard, speaks up about her parents and friends.
posted by haemanu at 7:11 AM on July 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Gala doesn’t have to have been NOT a monster for the double standard with which she was judged during and after her lifetime to be sexist as fuck.

Like she sounds like a goddamn nightmare. But Dalí was also a nightmare. Didn’t he try to kill several people, even before he apparently tried to kill Gala herself? Men are in general allowed to be utter monsters and it’s fine, especially if they’re mostly monsters to women. And yet it’s Gala who’s known as a demon.

So I’m not really interested in rehabilitating Gala into someone she wasn’t; it amounts to a kind of erasure. I’m interested in the person she actually was. It makes me wonder about the misogynist bullshit she dealt with, and at what point the anger from a lifetime of bullshit accumulated and spilled over into doing things like burning bores with cigarettes. Was there a final insult that did it? How did she lose her final last shred of inhibition and shame? That is fucking interesting to me.

I don’t want to erase Gala. I want Dalí and Picasso and the rest to be treated as the monsters they actually were, with the recognition that their monstrosity was far less brave, far less understandable (except perhaps as an extended tantrum), and far less interesting.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:23 AM on July 12, 2018 [20 favorites]


Dalí was a man whose affectations of eccentricity constituted what most of us think of as a personality, whose tolerance of fascism got him kicked out of the Surrealist club a long time ago, and whose paintings became intolerable (to me) around the Forties.

It's too bad that some artists feel the need to employ a real life Muse (always a woman, of course) in the production of their art. While the Surrealists were among the guiltiest in perpetuating this aesthetic misogyny, at least they weren't as predatory as Picasso (since his name has just popped up in this thread).

Gala was certainly unlike the usual more intellectual, talented, and attractive Muses male artists of the 20th Century liked to employ/exploit/screw. To turn the usual NYT author interview on its head, Gala and Dalí would be two people I would NOT want to invite to a dinner party. I'd throw Wagner in for a third unpleasant personality if I were allowed to exclude a composer from the dinner. (I'd invite Kafka, Buñuel and Ernst, not that anyone is asking.)
posted by kozad at 7:57 AM on July 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


One of my fave bits of trivia: the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL was designed by Yann Weymouth, the older brother of Talking Heads bassist, Tina Weymouth.

Nothing wrong with a bit of kink but Dali was really ahem screwed up about sex.

To the degree that Ian Gibson called his biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali and argued, with, I think, a sufficient amount of evidence, that his feelings of sexual shame and inadequacy are at the core of his entire life and career. The man was tortured by his desires for other men, by his self-loathing, by his own gender anxieties. He may be one of modern history's purest examples of someone utterly unable to exit the closet. And he turned his rage on himself and on others. I mean, obviously, the whole Gala/Salvador ménage was very OH MARTHA YOU LAUGHED YOUR ASS OFF, but it's hard to see how someone less "demonic" could even have stayed with him.

Honestly, I've never found the lives of either Gala or Salvador anything but a trainwreck that I want to look away from. I'm fonder of Misia Sert, Eugenia Errázuriz, and Marie-Laure de Noailles.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:57 AM on July 12, 2018 [6 favorites]


It's too bad that some artists feel the need to employ a real life Muse (always a woman, of course) in the production of their art.

I'm reminded of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's assessment of the woman-as-muse trope: "Bullshit."

I've actually just started her book about an old woman who ends up in a surrealist adventure at an old folks' home after being put away by her family, the delightfully titled "The Hearing Trumpet." So far it seems like a book about an old woman who has zero fucks to give about patriarchy and is intent on doing what she can, where she can, and it's about to get really weird.

I think I saw it recommended here on MeFi, actually.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:27 AM on July 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


No interview with the cooked pet rabbit

It was understandably unavailable for comment
posted by brianrobot at 11:23 AM on July 12, 2018


Cool links.

Demonic rabbit cookers, aristocrats, rich salon hosts... they are all equal now.

Marie-Laure de Noailles, Viscountess de Noailles, briefly appears on Man Ray's film "The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice"

And the Wikipedia link says Misia Sert inspired some of Mme Verdurin in Proust's books!
posted by haemanu at 11:39 AM on July 12, 2018


Well, killing a pet (let alone eating it) is Very Bad.

Wellll... I think when you are talking about a food animal like a rabbit it's a little different. I've known a number of people who treated rabbits and chickens they raised as pets, gave them names... and still ate them. Or any number of 4H kids who have raised animals with great tenderness and care... and then sold them for slaughter at the yearly fair.

Now, depending on the circumstances, it *could* be a sign of something very bad, if it was done for punishment or cruelty, but the hard and fast division of pet and working animal is something fairly recent.
posted by tavella at 3:10 PM on July 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


Luis Bunuel's memoir 'My Last Sigh' is quite interesting if you're curious about the history of these characters, surrealism, etc. There was quite a clash of personalities, but by that time Bunuel and Dali were already starting to drift apart. It's obvious that Gala helped transform Dali into an international media star, the rest is just art history.
posted by ovvl at 4:35 PM on July 12, 2018


Some think he never even had sex with Gala and just got off on watching her have sex with other people. One of his early masterpieces 'The Great Masturbator' is basically femdom by way of surrealism. Nothing wrong with a bit of kink but Dali was really ahem screwed up about sex.

Dali blamed his sexual problems on his father, who apparently hectored him with a book showing photos of men in late stages of syphilis. As for sex with Gala, Bunuel told a story of how Dali had called him up after he was no longer a virgin and went on and on how wonderful sex was. (Bunuel had his own issues, but he lost his virginity in a brothel, allegedly paid for by his own father.)

Dali probably would have been bisexual if he'd allowed himself. He was attracted to Lorca, and claimed that Lorca tried to "sodomize" him, but "it hurt."
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:49 AM on July 13, 2018


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