SURREAL

An overdue, comprehensive biography of a surrealist instigator.

Biographer Klein’s account of one of the driving forces of the surrealist movement is wonderfully thorough and rescues Gala Dalí from being cast in the role of “mere” muse, reclaiming her as the definitive artist and collaborator she was. Klein uses her subject’s first name throughout the book, essential because Gala held three surnames in her lifetime, two of them shared with far better-known men: French poet Paul Éluard and Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. Gala’s life and work have long been overshadowed by the famous men she was entangled with as husbands and lovers. Klein’s biography convincingly demonstrates how Gala was a singular player in the development of a major 20th-century art movement, whether in choosing the pen name for her first husband (born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel), while co-writing and editing his earliest poems, or creating work with Salvador Dalí, who often signed pieces with both their names: Gala Salvador Dalí. While Klein can deploy memorable turns of phrase, such as noting that Gala’s lover Max Ernst “exuded the sex appeal of a fallen angel,” this account of an astonishing life is surprisingly conventional. It’s a traditional soup-to-nuts chronological account, with an odd lack of emotional tension or psychological insight, especially since surrealism concerned itself with mining the depths of the unconscious and the wild and woolly ways it might reveal itself. Although there is much about lavish interior decoration (for example), there is less about Gala’s only child, Cécile Éluard, who is nearly absent in this biography of “the mother of Surrealism.”

A thorough account of Gala Dalí’s dramatic life and importance to surrealism, but short on emotional drive.