Someone once wrote that bringing Gala to light would unravel the Surrealist chequerboard which without her remains incomplete. Nothing could be truer. Gala was not only a key figure in the literary development of her first husband, Paul Éluard, who met her in Switzerland when they were both very young, at a time when he still didn’t even know he wanted to be a writer. She was not just the person who, after her visit to Cadaqués in 1929 as Éluard’s wife, glimpsed Dalí’s potential and gave up a successful life in Paris with the poet who was the darling of Surrealism for a young Catalan nobody with whom she was to share her life and a creative project.

The lover of the German painter Max Ernst and a friend of Crevel, Char and Joë Bousquet, photographed by Man Ray, Brassai, Beaton, Schaal, Horst and Lacroix, loved or hated, Gala was much more than just the beautiful, ambitious woman capable of wresting great artists and writers away from Breton’s control. She was more than her mysterious Russian aura, with her library, her roses to remind her of Russia and an exquisite world she shared with Dalí. Gala was an extraordinary writer who also contributed to ambitious projects like Dream of Venus and produced several Surrealist objects that were exhibited and talked about at the time. Gala, then, was more than just a muse and a model. She was an artist who was jointly responsible for Dalí’s creative project. The artist himself acknowledged this in his writings and in the double signature over the course of time: ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’. The time has come, then, to give Gala her rightful place on that old Surrealist chequerboard.

In 1971, an extensive photo reportage by Marc Lacroix in the magazine Vogue showed the world Púbol Castle, which from the very moment the project was made public was known as Gala’s home, her private space. Dalí himself presented it as a gift of ‘courtly love’ to his wife. To accept it, Gala made only one condition, as the artist reminisced: Dalí could only visit with a written invitation from the owner.

In Púbol, Gala was to spend long periods of time reconstructing her Russian memories; she emptied the rooms, in contrast to the clutter of Portlligat. The castle crypt was to be her burial place and also, especially, where she was to find the peace, the silence and the privacy she calls for in her manuscripts and which contrasts with the exuberance of her husband. But Púbol was much more than ‘Gala’s home’, more than Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own where Gala, the creator, could finally find her place. Púbol is more of a sort of extraordinary Surrealist object representing the grand finale of the Gala Salvador Dalí artistic duet, perhaps even their most sophisticated product.

• Imagining a room of one’s own

It may have been in her private rooms in Portlligat where Gala rehearsed the room of her own as the Surrealist object which Gala Salvador Dalí later developed and perfected in Púbol. In fact, and although the designs for the refurbishing came from Dalí’s pencil, and even in spite of some extraordinarily Dalinian details in the castle, Púbol is not solely the work of Dalí; Gala played a very active role in the process, as we see from the letters and from so many corners of the house stripped bare.

• Remembering: vestiges of Russia

In the silence of Púbol, Gala relived her Russian origins through objects, family photographs and a library in Cyrillic. Elena Diakonova –later Gala– was born in Kazan in 1894 to a family who instilled in her a passion for reading. They moved to Moscow and Gala, then a teenager, had the opportunity to meet the young poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Marina’s younger sister, Anastasia, remembered it years later. Those Russian vestiges were to accompany Gala for the rest of her life.

• The female dandy’s mirror: the collection and the image

Along with her Russian past –her memories and her library– Gala kept other collections at Púbol that made up the other part of her story, even a certain passion for objects for the Gala Salvador Dalí creative project. Recordings of Wagner, fluffy toys, books on the leading authors of Surrealism, as well as clothes by the top designers –including the fabrics designed by Dalí– all went to make up the world of this female dandy who rehearsed her image in a game of performances.

In 1912, Gala arrived at the sanatorium at Clavadel, suffering from a respiratory disease, like so many writers and artists of the time. There she met Paul Eugène Grindel and a romantic relationship sprang up between the two, driven by their shared passion for poetry. In fact, the young Paul soon chose his destiny, encouraged largely by Gala: he would be a poet and he would sign as Paul Éluard. They separated, but not for long. On her return to Russia, Gala persuaded her family to let her cross the war-torn continent, reaching her sweetheart’s house in Paris and marrying him in 1917. Soon afterwards, her daughter Cécile was born and Gala and Éluard began a successful career together, with Éluard as one of the Surrealists’ best-loved poets.

In view of events, then, why not rewrite the story going round that speaks of Gala as a simple muse? Wasn’t Gala a powerful influence in the destiny of the great poet? Wasn’t she the person who helped him discover his vocation, rather than the inspirer of so many beautiful poems? Perhaps Gala’s life had begun long before meeting Éluard. A tireless reader since her teenage years, she must have been a creative spur for the poet more than just his inspiration.

• Gala and the poet

If the poems Éluard writes to his wife are extraordinary, the letters to the young husband reveal the refined spirit in Gala’s literary creation. Her prose supports the notion of Gala as an intellectual accomplice and, above all, as someone well-read. The authorship is even blurred slightly when in the 1914 prologue to Dialogue des inutiles Gala presents the poet under the pseudonym Reine de Paleùglnn: ‘Do not be shocked that a woman –or rather, a stranger– is presenting this little volume to the reader’.

• The poet’s friends

In Paris, along with the poet Éluard, Gala was able to meet all the great creators close to Surrealism, who sometimes had misgivings about her –as in the case of Breton, who saw Gala as a rival– and sometimes saw her as a practical woman –Giorgio de Chirico asked her to be his agent– and sometimes with the warm friendship she shared with Crevel or with the passion of the painter Max Ernst. Whatever the case, the beautiful, intelligent Russian left no-one indifferent, even if she was disguised behind a wall of silence.