Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí

""Michele Gerber Klein—at long last—gives Gala Dalí the close-up she deserves. When Gala met Salvador, they met their destinies. Surreal takes us backstage at the endless performance piece that was the couple’s life’s work and life’s play—a salient ingredient—and reshuffles art history along the way. Pour a stiff Pernod or Absinthe, kick back, and enjoy this delightfully sparking read.""—Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring

""Original, engaging, and fiercely intelligent, Gala Dalí has at last inspired a biography that shares her own best qualities. In this brilliant book, Klein illuminates the crucial importance that Gala held not only for her famous husbands and lovers, but for avant-garde art as a whole.""—Caroline Weber, author of Proust’s Duchess and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

Surreal, the long-awaited, definitive biography of Gala Dalí, unmasks this famous yet little-known queen of the twentieth-century art world, who graced the canvases, inspired the poetry, and influenced the careers of her illustrious lovers and husbands with tenderness, courage, and agency.

Using previously undiscovered material, Surreal tells the riveting story of Gala Dalí, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France’s most famous poet Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dalí in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune. At a time when artists were celebrities, Gala acted as the ambassador of the Surrealist movement, spreading its popularity across the globe. She was the survivor of two world wars, the Russian revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and lived between France, Spain and the U.S. Gala was a heroine whose originality captivated people wherever she went, and her life story has everything: size; glamour; drama; true love, twisted love; ambition; money; art; defiance; daring and sweeping social unrest. In this vivid, detailed rendering, Michèle Gerber Klein has brought Gala out of the shadows to reveal a charismatic figure who played a pivotal role in the art world yet has never received the full recognition she deserves.

© 2025 Harper (Audiobook): 9780063220607

Release date

Audiobook: 1 April 2025