The Story of Surrealism Isn’t Whole Without Gala Dalí

The Story of Surrealism Isn’t Whole Without Gala Dalí

In his 1922 painting “Rendez-vous of Friends,” now a staple of 20th-century art history textbooks, Max Ernst depicted the Surrealist circle and its influences with only one woman in its midst: Gala Dalí, known then as Gala Éluard. Her inclusion is an indication of how fundamental she is to the history of the period. Despite being relegated by dismissively misogynistic language (Tim McGirk named his 1989 biography of her Wicked Lady), she is a hi…