Dali Galatea of the Spheres 60 x 80 cm art print

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Dalí made hundreds of drawings and paintings of Gala. That he worshipped her is clear. He was sexually fascinated by her but, by his own account, was afraid of sex (he was allegedly a virgin when he met Gala). So he tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, her affairs. Ian Gibson, Dalí’s biographer, has argued that he was pathologically timid and developed an exhibitionist persona as a protective device. One of the most representative works from the nuclear mysticism period. It is the outcome of a Dalí impassioned by science and for the theories of the disintegration of the atom. Gala’s face is made up from a discontinuous, fragmented setting, densely populated by spheres, which on the axis of the canvas takes on a prodigious three-dimensional vision and perspective. As Dalí clarified in his Anti-Matter Manifesto: “Today, the exterior world —the physical one— has gone beyond the psychological one. My father, today, is Doctor Heisenberg”. It is one of the most eloquent acts of homage to Gala’s face that Dalí produced, and he wanted it to be seen in the Palace of Winds in his Theatre-Museum, on an easel that had belonged to Meissonier, a painter of whom there are two works in the museum that formed part of Dalí’s private collection. Though many art critics and avant-gardists saw Gala's eagerness to court publicity and embrace the world of celebrity as calculated and vulgar, it was she who spotted the potential for this shy Spanish peasant boy to become the international face of Surrealism. Indeed, it was only through her tenacity and verve that the couple triumphed in America. As Miralles suggests, "without Gala, the great artist might never have been". Dalí i Domènech, Salvador Galatea of the Spheres Date 1952 Technique Oil on canvas Dimensions 65 x 54 cm Location Dalí Theatre-Museum

Gala also grew tired of living with her husband's eccentricities who, to appease her, bought Gala a castle in Púbol, Spain. It was a space that was Gala's alone; even her husband was not allowed to visit unless he was formally invited. Citing the co-ordinator of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Jordi Artigas i Cadena, Minder describes how Gala wanted the castle to be "a place of silence and nostalgia, designed for a lady looking for her lost Russian youth" and that Dalí "decorated the interior specifically for his wife, encrusting some ceilings with a 'G' coat of arms in her honor". Dalí himself wrote in his Unspeakable Confessions in 1973: "I gave her a mansion [...] where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky". Theirs was an open and bizarre marriage. Gala was sexually voracious and had many affairs, including with her ex husband Éluard. Letters to Gala is the published version of Éluard’s raw and twisted letters to Gala, which expose the powerful grip she held over him .Dalí fed the idea that he and Gala collaborated with each other, but there’s no evidence that Gala ever told Dalí what to paint. In the male-dominated Surrealist movement, though, Gala more than held her ground. A photo shows her playing chess with the Surrealists, the only female in view. She and Dalí were only too happy to be photographed together: the exhibitionism of their “private” life was itself a kind of performance art. On that project, at least, they worked as equals. Galatea of the Spheres is a painting by Salvador Dalí made in 1952. It depicts Gala Dalí, Salvador Dalí's wife and muse, as pieced together through a series of spheres arranged in a continuous array. The name Galatea refers to a sea nymph of Classical mythology renowned for her virtue, and may also refer to the statue beloved by its creator, Pygmalion.

Years later, having almost single-handedly engineered her husband's fame, Gala wanted to ensure that no one could gain access to their fortune. When the couple returned to Spain in 1958, they remarried in a religious ceremony because, having been married previously in a civil ceremony, the law dictated that if Gala were to divorce Dalí, or the painter were to die, his family would be legal heirs to his fortune. Dali and Gala met in 1929 and according to Dali, it was love at first sight. They married initially in 1934 in a civil ceremony and then in 1958, in a Catholic ceremony. Gala, who was Russian, had previously been married to Paul Elouard, a poet and founder member of the Surrealist movement. As Salvador rose to fame, Gala was at his side, acting as agent, model and artistic partner. She read tarot cards in hopes of predicting Salvador’s career trajectory but was also eager to follow more practical paths, negotiating with gallery owners and buyers to maximize her husband’s earnings. According to the New York Times’ Minder, Gala was so persuasive in this role that another surrealist, the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, asked her to serve as his agent, too. In this painting, Dalí depicts Gala as a bust portrait broken down into round spheres of color. Surrealist in style, when the spheres are viewed as a whole, the image of his wife becomes clear. Gala seems to float unanchored in a blue sky above a body of water. Dalí's fragmenting of this image, marks an interesting development in his work and displays his growing fascination with nuclear physics and the idea (a revelation to Dalí) that matter was made up of atoms. Dalí investigated these ideas, though never at the expense of his religious beliefs, in several paintings. He referred to works produced during this time as his "nuclear mysticism" period .The structure of DNA fascinated Dalí and like all enquiring minds, he set to work implementing it in his art; he created this artwork during his ‘nuclear mysticism’ period’. It is in effect an abstract portrait of his wife, Gala, her face is visible, created from disconnected spheres, the axis of the canvas disappearing in the distance creating the illusion of three dimensions. The three dimensional holographic image, represents a mix of renaissance art and atomic theory, the artists interest in nuclear physics began around 1945 when the first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima in 1945.

Galatea of the Spheres is a wonderful piece. Suspended spheres, depicting the atomic particles, orbit around and also create the face of "Galatea" who is a sea nymph in classical mythology. Her eyes are closed and the viewer is drawn to her mouth where the spheres appear to originate.Gala engaged in several trysts and enjoyed a long-term relationship with a young actor, Jeff Fenholt whom she first saw in a theater version of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1973. Gala lavished exorbitant amounts of money on Fenholt (a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and born again Christian) flying him from America to Spain, buying him a million-dollar-plus home in Long Island, and giving him several of Dalí's paintings as gifts. According to McGirk, when Fenholt sold the paintings at an auction in New York it "was the first that Dalí had heard about Gala's presents to Fenholt and this provoked a terrible fight between the couple ". It was the only one of Gala's affairs that threatened Dalí who, perhaps because of his own advancing age (and remembering Gala was some ten years his senior) became even more dependent on her and could not stand the thought of losing her to a man with whom she might have even fallen in love.

Salvador Dali, "One Second Before Awakening From a Dream Provoked by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate," 1944Gala Salvador Dalí: A Room of One’s Own in Púbol, a new exhibition at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, derives its name from Virginia Woolf’s similarly titled 1929 essay, which proclaims that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” to create. Galatea de las Esferas es una pintura realizada por Salvador Dalí en 1952. Representa a Gala Dalí, esposa y musa de Salvador, formándose con una serie de esferas. El nombre de Galatea se refiere a la ninfa del mar de la mitología clásica conocida por su virtud, aunque también podría referirse a la estatua amada por su creador, Pigmalión. (es) As with earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In Metamorphosis, the reflection of