Gala – muse, confidante, icon
Gala (Helena Deluvina Diakonoff) was born in Kazan, Russia, in 1894 and was essential to Dali`s transformation. More than a conventional muse, she became the artist`s intellectual accomplice, emotional counterweight, manager and ultimately one of the architects of his public identity. The Dalí Museum records how, from the early 1930s onward, she increasingly managed his finances, negotiations and relationships with galleries and collectors, while protecting the conditions in which he could work. Dalí even began signing his canvases with both names. Her presence in his paintings evolved from that of an intimate figure into something larger: an emblem, an idealised woman, a psychological landscape of her own. In works such as The Madonna of Port Lligat, Gala becomes inseparable from Dalí’s attempt to unite the spiritual, the erotic and the material.
