The MNAC claims the artistic role of Gala beyond Dalí’s muse
Gala in Barcelona
The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) places the focus on the character of Gala, Salvador Dalí’s partner, as the “key” character of the avant-garde of the 20th century, and gives her an artistic role beyond her muse facet of artists in the first major international exhibition dedicated to his figure.
It has been explained by the curator of the show Gala Salvador Dalí. An own room in Púbol, Estrella de Diego, together with the director of the MNAC, Pepe Serra, and the director of the Dalí Museums, Montse Aguer, in the presentation on Thursday of the tour of the different facets of the creator.
Just as with Dalí, Gala was part of a “collaborative project” that led the artist to sign with a ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’, the sample arises from an institutional alliance that wants to demonstrate the thesis that both characters were mutually constructed and gave birth to a third artistic character.
The exhibition, which brings together 315 paintings, drawings, photographs and documents related to Gala, part of Púbol as a “great surrealist object”, which Gala used as the room that Virginia Woolf claimed.
The exhibition discovers a very cultured Gala with many facets in which the route is divided and between which the curator has cited the surrealist, the dandy, the creator and the writer, as well as the muse as she builds her own path as an artist : write, make surreal objects and decide how you want to represent yourself.
Bad and manipulative?
“If Gala was so bad, so manipulative and she was so interested in money, why in 1929 did she leave the famous Paul Éluard, poet spoiled with surrealism, to go with an unknown Salvador Dalí?” Asks the curator and biographer. gala.
Knowing that many things have been said about Gala – Helena Dmitrievna Diakonova (Kazan, 1894-Portlligat, 1982) – the curator has said that this is “much more bad than it was said because it is more complex than it is Believe. ”
The exhibition reveals the changes in the image of Gala through its different ‘performances’, reflected by Dalí’s brushes, and allows to follow the evolution of the painter thanks to an important set of oil paintings and drawings: “To review Gala is to review Dalí, and this was a performer. ”
In addition, Dalí’s oil paintings and drawings on Gala can also be seen in the exhibition works of other artists who gravitated in the surrealist universe, especially around Gala, such as Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Brassaï, among others .
Max Ernst and Man Ray
The exhibition tries to shed light on who Gala really was, and to understand who was this woman who does not go unnoticed, who awoke the hatred of André Breton and Luis Buñuel, the unconditional love of Éluard and Dalí and the passion of Max Ernst, in addition to be a model for Man Ray.
The task of the curator has been to “fill gaps” in the history that had not been addressed until now, and notes a facet of outstanding literary creation that can be seen with letters -especially to Éluard- and manuscripts -such as diaries- present in the exhibition, as well as surrealist objects and ‘performances’.
For the curator of the exhibition -defrayed by Abertis in collaboration with the Damm Foundation-, Gala “is the key character missing from the surrealist board” and the exhibition tries to give this character the role that corresponds to it.
The exhibition also brings together a collection of Russian Gala books, and brings together a collection of dresses and objects, which have had to be restored to be displayed. Claims the facet of ‘dandy’ of Gala: “The dandys were always men, because they were the ones who looked, and here it happens the other way around, because it is Gala that looks”.
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