Dali Galatea of the Spheres 60 x 80 cm art print

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Gala became Dalì’s frequent model. Over 50 years, Dalí made myriad drawings and paintings of Gala. He depicted her variously as a madonna, an erotic figure, or a mysterious woman.

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. Gala 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. Arguably the most unique feature of Dalí's body of work is that he only ever used one female model. More than a muse, Gala is nothing short of a motif in his art. But as the critic Nina Sophia Miralles points out, Gala's "work wasn't restricted to sitting still long enough to be immortalized in oil [she] acted as agent, dealer, promoter, and jailer; she channelled all her ruthlessness into her promotion of him". critical association of delirious phenomena." Dali used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties. We get the impression of motion and speed with some spheres, consistent with the evident speed of real objects, orbiting in outer space and inside the atom.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. During the 1940s and 50’s his focus shifted to the natural sciences. The personalities he admired most were Freud and Einstein. During his nuclear mysticism phase, Dalí became interested in DNA structures. Gala’s story begins with her birth in Kazan, Russia, in 1894. Well-educated despite living in a region where higher education was forbidden to women, she suffered from poor health and was sent to a Swiss sanitorium after being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1912. Here, Gala met French poet Paul Éluard, who soon became her first husband and the father of her only child, a daughter named Cécile. By 1922, Gala had begun an affair with Max Ernst, who was so enamored with her that he featured her as the only woman in a group portrait of prominent surrealists.

Salvador Dali belongs to surrealism masters, whose works are considered to have been influenced by Renaissance art. When looking at any of Dali’s paintings, it would be not hard to notice that the artist was extremely talented and imaginative man. His works have always drawn considerable interest. One of such works is Galatea of the Spheres, which will be analyzed below. In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.”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. 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". Simultaneously muse, model, artist, businesswoman, writer and fashion icon, Gala has long been treated as a cipher by art historians, but thanks to the new Barcelona exhibition, she is finally emerging as a singular individual connected with—but not dependent on—the male surrealists who surrounded her. Dali and his wife, Gala, were trapped in the middle of a general strike and an armed uprising by Catalan separatists in 1934, in Catalonia, and this may have influenced his Spanish Civil War motif. Dali and Gala had to run Apparently Dalí wished for this painting to be displayed in the Dalí Theatre museum in Figueras, indeed it remains there til this day. This 1952 oil on canvas painting is a loving and honorable tribute to his wife and muse Gala, who often sat for him.