Sublime

the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

Their faith in him, in his ultimate triumph, remained unwavering, almost disconcertingly so. They were convinced—even as his own conviction was tested so many times that it was becoming difficult to self-generate it—that he would someday be an important artist, that his work would hang in major museums, that the people who hadn’t yet given him his

In her magnificent biography of Virginia Woolf, author Hermione Lee notes that the fear of incomprehensibility links madness and writing.

That June, to raise Paul’s spirits, Gala invited René Crevel and his bisexual girlfriend, the Austrian set designer Mopsa Sternheim, to summer with them in Seelisberg, at the bucolic Hotel Bellevue, where she and Mopsa became fast friends. They were joined by Louis Aragon and his new love: British heiress and influencer Nancy Cunard.

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