Portrait de Gala au homard

Portrait de Gala au homard was painted circa 1934 the year that Salvador Dalí and Gala Eluard (née Helena Diakanoff Devulina) were married. Gala, formerly the wife of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, lover and sacred muse of many other French Surrealists, was to become, through Dalí's art, one of the most repeatedly painted and obsessional figures in the history of modern art. From the time of their meeting in 1929, Gala began to figure in Dalí's art ever increasingly as a sacred icon of femininity, as virgin/mother, mystic muse and seductress. She is the one constant around which much of the fantastical universe of Dalí's overly fertile imagination wove itself. In 1934, it was Eluard, though still in love with Gala himself, who actively prevailed upon his ex-wife to marry Dalí, warning Gala that if Dalí was to die while she remained unmarried to him, she might be left with nothing. Gala and Dalí were married in Paris on 30th January 1934.

This painting of his new wife's image merged with a lobster and a monoplane is one of several portraits of Gala that Dalí painted at this time using his paranoiac critical method. In other works trees are depicted growing from Gala's hair, or lamb chops are displayed on her shoulder. When asked 'why lamb chops?, Dalí responded, 'because I love my wife and I love lamb chops. I see no reason why I shouldn't paint them together.' The lobster adornment that Dalí gives Gala here, was later the source of a fashionable 'Surrealist' hat that he created for Gala when they were taking the society world of New York by storm in the 1940s.

Explaining his method of juxtaposing bizarre imagery into a kind of startling psychological dream image, Dalí wrote that his "whole ambition in the pictorial domain (was) to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cognitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality... The illusionism of the most arriviste ...art, the usual paralyzing tricks of trompe l'oeil , the most discredited academicism, can all transmute into sublime hierarchies of thought.' (Salvador Dalí 'Conquest of the Irrational' cited in William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, New York, 1964, p.221 ) In November 1938, Portrait de Gala au homard was given by Dalí as a wedding gift to Paul Eluard's daughter Cécile Grindel-Eluard - a strange gift.