He wrote longingly to his beloved, “All the pebbles on the beach remind me of you. They are calling our name. This is starting to get real.” Through the long autumn nights, alone in his bedroom, he hugged the little knit bathing suit she had left behind. Meanwhile, Gala was hard at work on his behalf, making notes on their discussions and

Gala, who had taken her time getting to know Dalí, had discovered a true connection. He understood her mood swings and quick intuitions. She could help him realize his talent, which in many ways expressed her own way of seeing. She was ten years older than Dalí, and she found the artist’s youth and neediness very appealing. Here was someone she

Only vaguely aware of the turmoil she had caused in the Dalí household, Gala was blossoming. Northern Spain suited her. She loved the salty sea air, fresh food, and constant exercise. Her body was perfectly toned, and under the Iberian sun her skin had become what Dalí described as the color of a golden mink. She had arrived in Cadaqués unhappy and

On the first of the romantic, seemingly endless seaside explorations that would frame their nascent passion, Gala got right to the point. She wanted to know about the lower-left-hand corner of the incomplete work, where a muscle-bound man was befouling his pants, and asked Salvador directly if he was “coprophagic” [sic], because if so “she would

The Birth of Venus/Little Ashes,

As the Surrealists gathered to drink Pernod under the plane trees by the Mediterranean, Salvador, who found Gala’s “intelligent face” fascinating, made it his business to engage her in what he described as an “intellectual” discussion, during which he did everything he could to impress her with “the rigor” that he displayed in “the realm of ideas.”

Salvador Dalí’s dramatic courtship of Gala on the glorious Catalan coast was recorded in granular detail in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,1 where it reads like the script for a silent film.

When Dalí returned to Spain to prepare for his fall show in Paris at Camille Goemans,10 with whom he had just signed a contract for the 1929–1930 season, he was on the brink of international success.

The seventeen-minute-long Un Chien Andalou, which premiered on June 6, 1929, at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris in a double billing with Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château du Dé, was an instant hit.