Illumined Pleasures

1926–1927 · Wirkungsort

Paris

1927

“Honey is Sweeter than Blood”: the turn to Surrealism

At the Autumn Salon in Barcelona Dalí showed “Honey is Sweeter than Blood” and “Gadget and Hand”, works “equidistant between Cubism and Surrealism”, as he put it. Their dream imagery, rotting donkeys and dismembered bodies bemused the public, and critics debated whether he had become a Surrealist.

August 1929

Meets Gala

Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Diakonova, a Russian émigrée ten years his senior, then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.

1929

First Paris show; joins the Surrealists

Dalí's first Paris exhibition, eleven works at the Goemans Gallery, was a commercial success; André Breton called his new work “the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now”. That year he officially joined the Surrealist group, who hailed what he would call his paranoiac-critical method.

28 December 1929

His father throws him out

His father disapproved of his romance with Gala and his Surrealist friends, and on reading that he had exhibited in Paris a drawing inscribed “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait”, demanded a public recantation. Dalí refused and was thrown out of the family home, told he would be disinherited and must never set foot in Cadaqués again.

summer 1930

A fisherman's cabin at Port Lligat

Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in the nearby bay of Port Lligat; he soon bought it and over the years added the neighbouring ones, gradually building his beloved villa by the sea.