14.

The Impact of Salvador Dalí

Accompanied this time by film-maker Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí arrives in Paris to stay. He is already (through Spanish art magazines) well versed in surrealism, and particularly tantalized by rotting donkeys, shop-window (and real) mannequins … and Gala Éluard. Breton’s surrealist group meets René Magritte. Diaghilev dies in Venice. Dalí and Buñuel make a film, Un Chien Andalou, which – somewhat surprisingly – proves a hit with the surrealists.

In April 1929 Salvador Dalí returned to Paris, this time with future film-maker Luis Buñuel, the two of them planning to make a film devoid of any rational element whatsoever. Buñuel’s first idea had been to film the story of a newspaper which became animated, the film composed of shots of bounding news items, comic strips and other scraps of print, until at the end the paper would be thrown on to the pavement, swept into the gutter by a waiter. Dalí thought it was a terrible idea. Anyway, they were about to create something of an altogether different order. Buñuel (who had first visited in 1925) loved Paris – the cafés, the accordion music, the kissing couples in the streets, the fancy-dress balls … One evening, on his way to the Closerie des Lilas dressed as a nun, he and a friend (dressed as a monk) were stopped by two policemen. He had expected to be cautioned, even thrown in gaol, but no … ‘Good evening, Sister. Can we help you?’

Dalí and Buñuel were taken about by Miró (with whose work Dalí was already familiar). The three years since Dalí’s previous visit to Paris had done nothing to reduce his awkwardness; he was still very shy and had developed a new habit of bursting into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter in the company of strangers. Miró told him not to talk so much, advised some form of physical training and introduced him to a friend of René Magritte, Belgian dealer Camille Goemans, who was planning to open a gallery in the city. Goemans promised Dalí an exhibition later that year. After a visit to the brothels (where Dalí found the decor more appealing than the girls), Miró took them to the cafés, where they met Breton, Aragon and the other surrealists.

Dalí was by now well acquainted with surrealism, through Spanish art magazines as well as through exhibitions in Spain, but he did not yet see himself as a surrealist artist. At first, he was keen to distinguish himself from them,working out a position of his own in articles he was already publishing in L’Amic de les arts. He was still grappling with the issues that had preoccupied him since meeting Lorca, poet and ‘swarthy gypsy with black hair and a child’s heart’, who had spent the summer of 1927 with Dalí in Cadaqués, where he had succeeded in releasing (or increasing) Dalí’s ‘perversions’ (Dalí’s word). For Dalí the summer of intimacy had provoked a fascination with scatology and putrefaction, topics he went on to explore in detail in his articles and in early paintings. Now, he had succeeded in extricating himself from the relationship, having found their intimacy too perplexing. The tipping point had come in September 1928 with the publication of Lorca’s book of poems Gypsy Ballad Book, which Dalí found unforgivably retrograde. Lorca’s work was so conventional, it was not even poetic, Dalí told him. ‘You speak of a rider and you suppose that he goes on top of a horse … You have to leave things free of the conventional ideas to which intelligence has sought to subordinate them.’ To Lorca he recommended surrealism as ‘the one means of Escape’ and told him he should be concentrating on the escape from rational thinking, not the events of the previous summer. (Lorca, devastated, left Spain for New York, where, dazzled by the ambience of the city, he spent the next three months writing his first plays.)

Thus liberated, Dalí pursued with vigour his own researches into the subject of putrefaction. For Dalí, decay was the thing. His own bodily functions fascinated him; these, together with those of other organisms, constituted the main focus of his art between 1927 and 1929. The sight of anything disintegrating intrigued him, as did what he called ‘small things’ – ants, single hairs – and the sheer, uncanny notion that everything naturally ended in decay, in the process undergoing fascinating visual and textural transformations. Everything he looked at – his body, the world around him, even religious art – seemed to offer up its own dark side: the strange spectacle of decomposition and its metamorphoses. Development of the intriguing large, fluid, ‘soft’ forms which had first emerged in his Picasso-inspired work of 1926 remained on hold while he painted these intricate figures and objects, truncated body parts and decomposing animals, perhaps most starkly conveyed in two works of 1927, Honey is Sweeter than Blood and Apparatus and Hand. In the latter a kite-like apparatus, part geometric, part human (very like the structure in Ernst’s Elephant Celebes), is surrounded by smaller forms apparently stranded in mid-air, including a torso, random female figures, a pair of free-standing breasts and a partially decayed headless donkey. Etched in ghostly wisps of white where the head should be is a bird with the skeleton of a fish. Through the top of the whole bizarre construction appears a flayed hand, vivid with blue veins, apparently in the process of electrocution.

Dalí continued painting in this style, referencing Ernst once again in The Spectral Cow (1928), reminiscent of the German artist’s The Beautiful Season. Where in Ernst’s painting the interior of the goat is revealed, Dalí goes one step further. The Spectral Cow depicts a flayed animal surrounded by the decaying bodies of other indeterminate creatures rotted to almost nothing, the head of a robust-looking worm the only live creature shooting up from inside it. To the right of the scene a disembodied form (which again resembles the apparatus in Apparatus and Hand) floats free. The apparatus has no rational identity or purpose. The real subject of The Spectral Cow seems to be nature herself – the earth is dark brown, the sea blue, the background earth-pink turning to brownish-yellow and suspended above the whole scene is a clearly delineated, milky full moon.

All things rotting fascinated Dalí and he wrote about decomposing donkeys, disintegrating cows, putrefied giraffes; he was unprepared to exclude even the saints from his examinations. (In 2016 the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Malaga showed a stuffed donkey perched like a seated human at the top of an immense pile of books on every subject.) For Dalí the point of art was revelation, not obfuscation or concealment, the latter having been perpetrated, in his view, by the ancient religious artists, since where there was no decay there was no truth and thus no true spiritualism; if these painters’ work was art, then contemporary artists, he thought, needed to practise what he began calling ‘anti-art’. In one of his earliest published articles, ‘Description of the Figure of Saint Sebastian’ (1927), he reimagined the head of Saint Sebastian split into halves, one made of something like a jellyfish. In another article, ‘Putrefaction’, he wrote that on the ‘other side of Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass’ was putrefaction; by looking at the figure of the saint from behind, he claimed, he had gradually discovered ‘the whole world of the putrefieds’. He saw no virtue, in any case, in reverence for the art of the past, pointing out that even the Parthenon had not actually been built as a ruin; in its own day it had been as new as a 1928 automobile. (In 2017 Damien Hirst inverted that observation with Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, displayed at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi across five thousand square metres of pavilion space, the result of a spoof excavation by a freed slave, the immense, apparently sea-drenched treasures in fact created by Hirst between 2007 and 2017.) According to Dalí, if photography had been invented then, photographs of the newly constructed Parthenon would mean more to us today than our obsession with its ‘miserable ruins’. The mechanized world of the present was surely ‘perfect and pure as a flower’; there were countless examples of such beauty in everyday life – white wash basins and refrigerators, the telephone, the phonograph … works of art should surely be treated like those objects: all, though beautiful in their own way, replaced when they wore out, like old shoes.

For Dalí, in the modern world the art of photography took the place of the religious art of the past, since in revealing the world precisely, in all its physicality, the camera rendered things truly spiritual. He was equally fascinated by the art of cinematography. ‘In the cinema, a tree, a street, a game of rugby, are transubstantiated in a disturbing manner’, that is, unembellished and unaltered by the eye of the maker, since the ‘anti-artistic’ film-maker is anonymous, invisible behind the camera, shooting the world as it really is, composed, in the here and now, of a coffee shop, a simple room, ‘a kiss inside a taxi’. He himself, he considered, looked at the world not merely as a photographer but as a film-maker, as through a precision lens or a magnifying glass, to uncover and bring into focus figures and things in motion; he claimed he had once (by using binoculars?) discerned ‘on the deck of a white packet boat, a girl with no breasts teaching sailors to dance the black bottom’. In an article of December 1927, ‘To Luis Buñuel, Film-maker’, he warned, ‘Careful! A lot of birds are coming forth!’ (echoing the photographer’s warning in Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel).

In early 1928 he had set out his own position as an artist in an article immodestly entitled ‘The New Limits of Painting’. In it he distinguished between the ‘art of conception’ (early de Chirico and the cubist painters) and ‘the art of perception’ (Vermeer and the Impressionists, painters who looked without theorizing and painted what they saw). In another piece of 1928, ‘Joan Miró’, he had specifically pinpointed photography and the cinema as forerunners of surrealism, arguing that ‘nothing could be more favourable to the osmosis between reality and surreality than photography’. Increasingly, then, he was beginning to identify with surrealism; and by 1929 he remained unconvinced by only one element of the surrealists’ agenda – their interest in automatism, which he was unable to reconcile with his own emphasis on viewing the world objectively, as through a lens. (In Dalí’s terms, automatism presumably counted as art, rather than anti-art.) In an article of February 1929 he wrote of documentary cinema that it was ‘the most complete, scrupulous and exciting cataloguing ever to be imagined’, identifying it as the supreme form of ‘anti-art’. As for Ernst and Magritte before him, for Dalí the very business of cataloguing was inventive, involving ‘the capturing of an UNKNOWN REALITY. Nothing will prove Surrealism right as much as photography, with the unusual faculties of the Zeiss lens!’ He read Breton’s Nadja and completely understood it, as Breton had intended it, as a kind of documentary. By the time he arrived in Paris in April 1929 Dalí was an enthusiastic advocate of surrealism.

In the streets of Paris, he was tantalized by the shop windows, with their displays of shoes and mannequins, those sur-real objects already rendered uncanny by Man Ray, Vionnet and Vigneau. Dalí described them: ‘quiescent in the electric splendour of shop windows, with their neutral mechanical sensualities and disturbing articulations’. Just as bizarre, to his eye, were the live mannequins, in those days employed in department stores to model the outfits on sale, ‘sweetly stupid … walk[ing] with the alternating rhythm and opposing movement of hips and shoulders, clasping unto their arteries the new, reinvented physiologies of their costumes’ (life imitating art). Of the painters he now met in Paris, those he most admired were Miró, with his free-floating objects and calligraphy, and Ernst, then still painting horses, their manes flying, galloping through the sky, and works such as Inside Sight: The Egg, in which the mother as well as the baby birds are visible through the eggshell – forms within unhatched forms. Ernst was also just completing his first collage-novel, The Hundred Headless Woman (1929), composed of some hundred and fifty separate papiers collés lifted straight from other illustrated publications, the images spliced scene by scene, as in the cinema. (An enormous pair of naked legs bursts through a box while two diminutive, fully clothed men look on. Against a minuscule city backdrop an outsized hand holding a dial or measure is set against the gigantic geometric rays of the sun.) Since the invention of frottage and grattage Ernst had continued to explore the interaction of internal and external experience, though this is not to be confused with painting pictures of dreams. As he himself put it, ‘If the Surrealists are called painters of a continually fluctuating dream-reality, this should not be understood to mean that they copy their dreams on canvas.’

Others involved in surrealist activity by that spring included Belgian artist René Magritte, in Paris since 1927, who was already being championed by Breton as the only painter in the Belgian group of surrealists (the others being philosophers and poets). While still in Belgium, Magritte’s first professional commission had been with filmmaker Paul Nougé, with whom he designed a catalogue for a Brussels furrier, advertising luxury fur coats. Their spreads had depicted headless, legless women; a woman stepping through a free-standing door unattached to a wall; women with dissolving bodies, eyes closed or otherwise obscured; the head of a woman partially obscured by a cut-out of a car. Nougé’s captions were correspondingly surrealist. ‘Dressed thus, she requires no explanation’: ‘Not in the eyes, not in the hands, it is in the folds of the coat that she hides her secrets and yours.’ Magritte’s paintings of 1927 were similarly, if more brutally, unsettling. In Girl Eating a Bird (Pleasure) a girl eats a bird with macabre relish, blood dripping from her lips; in A Murderous Sky dead, still-bleeding birds are strewn across a pile of rubble. As Magritte himself put it, his interest, like Dalí’s, was in showing a thing becoming ‘gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself’.

Through Goemans Magritte had met Miró, Ernst and others. Though Magritte never lived in the city (he and his wife, Georgette, lived in the suburb of Le Perreux-sur-Marne), by 1929 he had established strong connections in Paris, notably with Aragon and Breton. His work became increasingly identifiable as surrealist. During those early years there he produced Man with a Newspaper (1928, now in the Tate Modern), a work in four frames in which the man with the newspaper appears only in the first; and The Reckless Sleeper, in which the sleeper lies in an alcove suspended in the sky above a stone or tablet in which are set apparently unrelated objects – bird, hat, mirror, ribbon, candle, apple; he may be dreaming of them, or they may be simply, arbitrarily, there. Another work of 1927, The Key of Dreams, consists of four pictures each accompanied by a caption, but the captions are unrelated to the images – except for one (which, though it matches its image, is written in a different language from the rest). As in Miró’s work, there is no easy correlation between word and image; the word does not explain the image, it merely unsettles the relationship between word and thing. Magritte’s connection with the Paris surrealist group deepened that spring of 1929, but though his work seemed (and still seems) unquestionably surrealist in style, he was never particularly close to any of the surrealist group. Even so, during his less than three years in (or near) Paris, he produced a hundred and seventy new works, among them major surrealist paintings, including The Treachery of Images (1929), his painting of a pipe which famously bears the caption, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ – ‘This is not a pipe’. (It is a painting.) With the arrival of first Magritte and now Dalí, surrealist painting in Paris was rapidly moving in new directions. Breton was preparing the December 1929 issue of La Révolution surréaliste, in which he planned to reproduce works by both artists. He was, however, running short of funds, and with no new support forthcoming.

By the summer Dalí and Buñuel were ready to show Un Chien Andalou to a small group of friends at the Studio des Ursulines cinema. The animated-newspaper idea had been abandoned, its place taken by a startling cinematic collage of images allegedly taken from Buñuel’s and Dalí’s dreams. Made with financial backing from Buñuel’s father, the twenty-four-minute silent film began with the close-up of a razor blade slicing into an eyeball (Dalí’s dream of his mother), followed by a succession of apparently random actions – a man riding a bicycle with no hands on the handlebars, a couple viewed from above, kissing in the street beside an enormous glossy car … until the final shot, of a couple buried up to their chests in sand, ‘blinded, in rags, being eaten alive by the sun and swarms of insects’. Dalí’s major contribution (according to Buñuel) had been the idea for the shot of two dead donkeys splayed out beneath the lids of two grand pianos, their decaying heads lolling across the keyboards. In Dalí’s opinion, with the opening shot they had made artistic history, ruining ten years of ‘pseudo-intellectual’ post-war avant-guardism: ‘That foul thing which is figuratively called abstract art fell at our feet, wounded to the death, never to rise again, after having seen “a girl’s eye cut by a razor blade …” ’ In fact, the eyeball was a cow’s – which hardly diminished the impact.

Un Chien Andalou impressed everyone who saw it. Buñuel knew about the surrealists’ reputation for storming events and had prepared himself for one of their protests, but Breton and his group all loved the film. Breton immediately began attempting to persuade Buñuel to publish the full screenplay as an exclusive in the forthcoming issue of La Révolution surréaliste. (He succeeded, despite competition.) Breton’s mood had, in any case, improved, perhaps as a result of his latest romantic conquest – Cocteau’s friends Jean and Valentine Hugo were on the point of separating because of her affair with Breton, an unexpected turn of events which, if nothing else, had apparently resolved the Simone/Suzanne dilemma, at least for the time being. Cocteau’s friend the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who had recently begun to provide backing for avant-garde films, had been in the audience at the Studio des Ursulines. He was so impressed by the film that on 1 July (three months before the commercial opening at Studio 28 scheduled for 1 October) he arranged a private showing in his fabulously ostentatious home.

Cocteau also admired the film. In the midst of preparing his next book, Opium, for publication he amended his observation that he had so far seen only three great films (Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Holmes Junior, Chaplin’s Gold Rush and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin). ‘I add: Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. There it is, the style of the soul. Hollywood was becoming a luxury garage and its films were more and more beautiful types of motor-cars. With Un Chien Andalou we are back on our bicycles. Go forward and fall, bicycle, bull-ring horse, flea-ridden donkeys.’ The film showed the flow of ‘blood from the soul’s body’, seldom if ever portrayed.

It is this inexpressible thing, this phantom of the awakening of condemned men, that the screen shows us like objects on a table. Only Buñuel can bring his characters to those moments of paroxysm in suffering when it becomes natural and as though fated to see a man in a frock coat ploughing up a Louis XVI bedroom. If Buñuel fascinates Eisenstein this must be through Freud. The complex of hands and doors …

To accompany their showing, on 3 July the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles gave a spectacular party in their great mirrored ballroom with its frescoed ceiling and an up-to-the-minute projection room, equipped for sound, the workings concealed behind rococo panelling. Guests included Cocteau, the Beaumonts, the Jean Hugos (evidently presenting a united front for the occasion) and assorted members of the gratin. The more Marxist-inclined surrealists were scathing about the de Noailles’ ostentation but had no problem enjoying their hospitality. Picasso attended the party, then seemed to go into retreat. From now on, he occasionally appeared with Olga, but they seemed to have more or less given up on social engagements. Picasso had come to the end of his époque des duchesses. He retreated to work on new sculptures and to spend time, still secretly, with Marie-Thérèse. Though he had missed the preview of Un Chien Andalou, he saw the film later that year. He said he admired it because it was so Spanish.

For the time being Picasso still resolutely dissociated himself from surrealism, though he was concerned to establish his own position vis-à-vis Breton’s. A short time later he told his dealer Daniel Kahnweiler that of course the word ‘surrealist’ had been his own invention, taken up and published by Apollinaire, and that it meant ‘something more real than reality’. Putting aside the question of who first thought of it, Picasso’s interpretation (echoing Apollinaire’s) was thus closer to Dalí’s than to Breton’s, and Picasso (like Dalí) never agreed with Breton about the relevance of either Freud or Marx. To another friend (writer André Warnod) Picasso said more or less the same thing. ‘Resemblance is what I am after, a resemblance deeper and more real than the real, that is what constitutes the sur-real.’ In February that year Michel Leiris had published an article in Documents in which he, on the other hand, argued that Picasso’s work was too ‘down to earth’ to be surrealist. It ‘never emanates from the foggy world of dreams, nor does it lend itself to symbolic exploitation – in other words, it is in no sense surrealist’. Even so, Picasso continued to watch carefully as surrealism evolved from its origins in poetry that appealed (he said) to ‘pale young girls rather than girls in good health on the grounds that moonlight is more poetic than sunlight etc …. Dada followed a better route’, into works on canvas by Ernst, Miró, Magritte and now Dalí. Within three or four years Picasso was telling friends, ‘the Surrealists … were right. Reality is more than the thing itself. I always look for its super-reality.’ His own fully surrealist phase was still to come – in the mid-1930s, after he met Dora Maar. In the meantime, once Miró, Magritte and Dalí had begun to move centre stage it was clear the artistic tide in Paris had already turned.

Dalí remained in Paris for the preview of Un Chien Andalou but not for the party or the commercial opening in October. In June he returned to Cadaqués to spend the summer with his family. The evening before he left the city, Goemans took him to the Bal Tabarin. They had just sat down when a man came in with a woman in a black-spangled dress. ‘That’s Paul Éluard, the Surrealist poet’ (with a friend, not Gala), said Goemans, and called them over. Before leaving, Éluard promised to visit Dalí in Spain.

Dalí thus once again just missed the new season’s show by the Ballets Russes – in the event, the company’s last production. Le Bal opened in June at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, a tale of love and magic which unfolds during a masked ball, with sets and costumes this time by de Chirico, who (though he had designed sets for the Ballets Suédois in 1924 and for a production of his brother’s in Italy in 1925) was working for the first time with Diaghilev. The script was an adaptation by Boris Kochno of the original story, set in the Romantic period, which Kochno described as a poetic episode with a mysterious, unearthly character which he thought few people understood. Though de Chirico’s sets were hardly typical of the period, Kochno was satisfied that they reflected the spirit of the piece, the sets successfully accentuating the ballet’s ghostly elements. For the costumes de Chirico had used motifs adapted from classical architecture – scrolls, triumphal arches, Ionic capitals – and marbled not only the walls of the ballroom but also the fabric of the costumes, giving the dancers the appearance of animated statues. His designs proved hugely popular. On the last night of the production he was called to the stage – ‘Scirio! Scirio!’ – to take his bow with the composer and principal dancers. Cocteau, in the audience, found himself moved, after always associating de Chirico with the ‘eloquent silence’ of his canvases, to see him ‘emerging suddenly from the deathly silence of private views into a din of applause, like the bull from the darkness of the toril’ (bull pen).

Le Bal was successful in all its venues – Paris, Monte Carlo, Berlin and London, where the final performance took place at the Royal Opera House on 29 July. By 19 August the great maestro of the Ballets Russes was dead. Diaghilev, who had always feared death by water, was taken ill on the Lido, in the last stages of diabetes, having neglected his health for many months. The local Venetian doctor was no help – he thought Diaghilev might be suffering from rheumatism, typhus, influenza, septicaemia … At the Grand Hotel des Bains, he took to his bed. On the night of 18–19 August his great friend Misia Sert was summoned to his side. Discovering he could not pay for further medical assistance, she rushed off to pawn her diamond necklace until the arrival of Chanel, his other devoted friend, who took care of all the arrangements, including his funeral. ‘In the grey hour, three gondolas moved away from the hotel’ … ‘That floating bed of honour, a Venetian convoy, carried the magician’s remains to the funeral isle of San Michele.’ It was followed by a gondola containing Kochno and Lifar, Misia and Chanel, all dressed in white, the only four mourners at the cemetery. Following a brief service in the Russian Orthodox church, Diaghilev was buried in the Greek section of San Michele. He died penniless, having always invested everything he earned straight into his next production. And so, as Janet Flanner informed readers of the New Yorker, ‘the Ballet that altered stage decors in England, France, and America, and left a rich heritage of color and form to a generation that originally wished for neither’ came to an end.

By the time Dalí arrived at Cadaqués, the whitewashed coastal village of his childhood and adolescence, he had already received a telegram from Goemans offering three thousand francs for all the paintings he could paint that summer, to be exhibited in Paris in November. The cable was followed by Goemans himself, who expressed particular enthusiasm for the painting Dalí was working on, The Lugubrious Game, a scene depicting open spaces, ornate statuary and a male figure with excrement running down his legs. A few days later Magritte and his wife arrived, followed by Buñuel. Éluard and Gala were on their way. ‘Thus, within four days I was surrounded for the first time by surrealists’, all attracted there (he assumed – probably rightly) by his extraordinary personality. Even in his native surroundings Dalí was assailed, as in Paris, by fits of shyness and nervous giggles. In the midst of serious discussion, he would dissolve into peals of laughter. Don’t ask Dalí, someone would say, we’ll be in for another ten minutes of it. He was already ‘writhing with laughter’ one morning when a car stopped in front of his house and Éluard and Gala stepped out. They arranged to meet him for drinks at five o’clock.

The whole assemblage of surrealists went with him to join the Éluards. Over a drink beneath the plane trees, Dalí’s ‘case’ was explained to Éluard (his paintings were good, but potentially offensive), then Gala and Dalí went for a walk, after which they arranged to meet again for a swim the following morning. At eleven o’ clock Dalí looked out of the window and saw Gala already there; he instantly recognized her bare back and ran out to meet her. Gala was in holiday mood, enjoying the beach and the sunshine, and now here, to add to her delight, was the black-haired, olive-skinned slender young boy, whose father, like Éluard’s, was rich, and whose art, like Éluard’s, was original, sensuous and excitingly progressive. Éluard it was who sent Gala to question Dalí more closely, wary of the scatological aspect of his painting. She was to ask him whether that element was a vital component of his art, or merely incidental.

The following day Dalí went over to the Hotel Miramar to meet Gala. She talked to him about The Lugubrious Game and told him she recognized that his work was important but that, if the scatological aspect reflected his personal taste, he should know they had nothing in common; and if he saw his art as a means of proselytism and propaganda, that was almost as bad, since he ran the risk of undermining it by reducing it to the level of a psychopathological document. Dalí set her mind at rest; scatology was merely a terrorizing influence, he told her, on a par with blood, or his phobia for grasshoppers, which had horrified him since childhood, when he had once picked up a small fish whose head reminded him of one. The start of his relationship with Gala was thus marked, as he noted in his memoirs, by ‘a permanent character of diseased abnormality’ (as any element of sexual deviance was classified, before Freud’s writings gained wider credence) and by his irrepressible sense of humour. Dalí and Gala spent hours alone together, walking, swimming, day-dreaming in silence and amusing themselves by pushing granite blocks over the edge of a cliff, before Dalí experienced an overwhelming desire to push Gala over, too, at which point they decided they had better stop. Gala was hooked. She told Dalí she had already realized they would never part. Now she just had to decide what to do about Éluard. By 26 September Dalí’s father had changed his will, leaving all his property to his daughter (Dalí’s sister, Ana Maria), almost certainly his reaction to his son’s outrageous dalliance with Gala, a shameless, married woman. Gala left for Paris with her daughter Cécile, taking with her, at Éluard’s request, the controversial painting The Lugubrious Game.