In his 1922 painting “Rendez-vous of Friends,” now a staple of 20th-century art history textbooks, Max Ernst depicted the Surrealist circle and its influences with only one woman in its midst: Gala Dalí, known then as Gala Éluard. Her inclusion is an indication of how fundamental she is to the history of the period. Despite being relegated by dismissively misogynistic language (Tim McGirk named his 1989 biography of her Wicked Lady), she is a historical lynchpin, a fundamental connector.
In Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí, author Michèle Gerber Klein doesn’t argue for her place in history but merely presents the facts, leaving us no choice but to conclude how absurd it is that Gala’s name is not as well known as that of her husband of nearly five decades, Salvador Dalí, something the artist himself would likely have never considered. He credited her publicly at every juncture and even signed some of his canvases, like “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening” (1944), with both their names.
Gala’s centrality earned her the moniker “the Mother of Surrealism,” as she witnessed the movement practically from its inception. Though she spent her early years in Russia, a bout of tuberculosis as a teenager brought her to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she fell in love with the young French writer Paul Éluard. They soon married and moved to France, where Paul became fast friends with André Breton and the burgeoning Surrealist circle. She left her husband and daughter after falling in love with Salvador Dalí in 1929 during a trip to Spain, quickly becoming a driving force behind marketing and selling his work. Her influence on other artists and writers most closely associated with the movement was immense: Éluard wrote pages of poetry about her, André Breton modeled the main character in his 1928 novel Nadja after her, René Char dedicated a book to her, and Yves Tanguy was a witness at her second wedding.
However, the book’s title contradicts the character that Gerber Klein diligently constructs. She describes Gala as a woman whose intelligence, elegance, and shrewd strength were noted by almost all who met her. While Salvador is characterized as eccentric, embodying Surrealism by showing up variously dressed in capes, adorned with his own canvases, and even in a diver’s suit, it is Gala who chooses what he wears and who appears at his side impeccably dressed, most often in a Chanel suit. (She was buried in Dior.) In the eyes of an acquaintance, she was “hard,” a “soldier,” while another called her “intrepid,” Salvador’s “rock.” “Surreal” seems an ill-fitting label for the figure who represented the “de facto commercial side of Dalí’s practice” and frames the book as if it were a story of Gala as a muse rather than an agent, manager, and marketer.
Happily, it is only Gerber Klein’s title that hews to her subject as muse. The bulk of the biography focuses on Gala as an instigator, giving her the credit she’s owed. What is missing is why she had this incredible drive. Was it rooted in her upbringing in Russia, growing up reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Or the early loss of her father, and her mother’s subsequent relationship with another man that taught her that her own survival depended on her husband’s? The smallest insight comes at the end of the book, and it is all too familiar: “She would, she confided, have liked to be a man because then she could have ‘accomplished great things.’” Her friend Michel Pastore wrote in an essay that perhaps she gave the men in her life “the destiny she wanted for herself.”
Despite our best efforts, our subconscious desires will out. For Gala, they manifested not in spindly legged elephants and dripping clocks but as canny marketing campaigns, global recognition in the media, and an undeniable place in art history.
Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí (2025) by Michèle Gerber Klein is published by Harper and is available online and through independent booksellers.
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