ceremony (Gala's former husband died in 1952). Gala managed Dali's business affairs for their entire marriage a task to which the artist was unsuited. Dali considered Gala his world and his

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". The Italian fashion designer and couturier (and great rival to Coco Chanel) Elsa Schiaparelli was one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the wars. She and Dalí were introduced by Man Ray around the mid-1930s in Paris and the pair started to collaborate, designing a perfume in the shape of a telephone dial, an actual telephone with a fake lobster as its receiver and the so-called Tears Dress based on Dalí's painting Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms Skins of an Orchestra (1936). In 1937 Schiaparelli produced the Shoe Hat which was made famous by Gala. The inspiration for the hat was based on her 1933 photograph of Dalí balancing her slippers on his head and shoulder. The hat was captured for posterity in a photograph by Georges Saad (published in the October 1937 " L'Officiel de la Mode et de la Couture") and Gala herself was shown modeling the hat in a photograph taken by André Maillet the following year.

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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. Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) is from Dali's Paranoiac-critical period. Painted using oil on canvas, it contains one of Dali's famous double images. The double images were a

Dali asked for this piece of art to be displayed on the easel belonging to a French artist named Meissonier.Gala] always felt more comfortable in the shadows, but like Dalí she also wanted to become a legend one day,” Dalí Museums director Montse Aguer explained in a statement. “This mysterious, cultured woman, a gifted creator, colleague and peer of poets and painters, lived her art and her life in an intensely literary manner. … [She was] Gala, an elegant and sophisticated woman, acutely aware of the image she wanted to project. Gala, the focal point of mythologies, paintings, sketches, engravings, photographs and books. Gala Salvador Dalí.” Dalí had an incredible mathematicians mind and has often been compared to Leonardo da Vinci for his all-encompassing intellect and knowledge over an incredible array of subjects. 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. An exhibition at the National Art Museum of Catalonia, in Barcelona, tries to piece together Gala’s side of the story, recasting her as not simply a muse, but a writer, conceptual artist and performer ahead of her time. It displays a selection of Dalí’s paintings, photographs of them together, and some of Gala’s letters to family, friends and lovers, as well as a diary that was recently unearthed from her castle in Púbol. The diary is self-consciously literary, and a letter to the artist René Crevel reveals that Gala claimed to be working on a novel – though no manuscript has been found.

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 reality, both the smallest and largest aspects of the visible creation are designed along similar principles. This is most apparent in the organisation of atomic particles and galaxies. Both of their structures involve spheres, maintaining precise orbits and spatial distribution. It is almost as if an atom contains its own miniature universe. 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 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". In response, she medicated Dalì with Valium, which made him lethargic, and with amphetamines, which woke him up. The latter gave Dalì“irreversible neural damage.” There’s speculation that Gala attempted to poison him.