The Dream

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.

November 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.

November – December 1933

First New York show: “frozen nightmares”

Dalí's first New York exhibition, twenty-six works at Julien Levy's gallery, was a commercial and critical success. The New Yorker's critic praised their precision and lack of sentimentality, calling them “frozen nightmares”.