{"id":207880,"date":"2025-10-18T02:34:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T02:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/207880\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T02:34:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T02:34:13","slug":"when-salvador-dalis-muse-cooked-their-own-pet-rabbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/207880\/","title":{"rendered":"When Salvador Dal\u00ed’s muse cooked their own pet rabbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gala<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Fen Labalme \/ Roger Higgins, World Telegram)<\/p>\n

Fri 17 October 2025 9:30, UK <\/p>\n

Behind almost every accomplished artist is an equally compelling muse. It\u2019s only fitting, then, that el maestro of the mind\u2019s depths himself, Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/a>, would succumb to another described by many as a \u2018monster\u2019.<\/p>\n

Most documents about the kind of person Gala Dal\u00ed was are enough to leave a bitter taste. More than just a domineering fixture of her own traumas, tragedies, or the external pressures of societal oppression, Gala was, so it would seem, a horrendous person. Her extremities were not ones you\u2019d regard with the kind of earnest pride at witnessing someone stand up to people \u2013 it\u2019s the kind you turn your nose up at because it\u2019s so far removed from anything deemed socially acceptable to begin with.<\/p>\n

If Gala didn\u2019t like someone, she\u2019d spit at them. If she grew tired of them talking, she\u2019d stub her cigarette out on their arm. In Paris, she was known as a \u2018spiteful\u2019 person with demonic tendencies. Luis Bu\u00f1uel apparently once got so tired of her behaviour that he tried to strangle her. The list goes on \u2013 one of Dal\u00ed\u2019s dealers, John Richardson, once decorated an entire article with especially colourful language about all the reasons she was the very definition of devil\u2019s spawn.<\/p>\n

Some argue that she\u2019s the art world\u2019s most misunderstood muse. But even attempts to clear the mist surrounding her reputation fall flat against the facts, particularly her fixation with fame and money. And so why, then, did impressionable, naive 24-year-old Dal\u00ed fall deeply in love at first sight with her, only to have his ardour intensify with the passing of time, throughout his and her lifetimes? Dal\u00ed himself claimed Gala was able to sense his genius; she thought him one.<\/p>\n

Back then, Gala\u2019s feelings were convincing. She left a life of luxury in Paris with \u00c9luard to be with Dal\u00ed in Portlligat. She became his muse in every sense of the word, an object of many of his best works and what some claim to be the making of the artist himself, beyond the passive implications of sitting still as he created his weirdly wonderful surrealist worlds around her. There\u2019s certainly a lot of romance in some of their most famous collaborations, even considering how much Dal\u00ed\u2019s success made people grow sceptical of his motivations as an artist and the nature of their relationship as it grew more mythologised.<\/p>\n

Gala has been depicted time and time again as this evil, villainous figure<\/a> who changed Dal\u00ed and turned him into a sellout. People physically couldn\u2019t be around her, so they say, because of her temperament and how she spoke to people. Once, before a trip that would leave their pet rabbit home for days, Gala cooked it and fed it to the two of them over lunch, revealing after the fact what she\u2019d done. Dal\u00ed was reportedly nauseous at the revelation, but Gala said it was the highest form of cherished love \u2013 consuming something she cared about that much.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s enough for anybody to assess her character, probably to a good degree of accuracy. But often, as is the case with these haunted figures, overuse of aggressive descriptors aimed at Gala removes any sense of nuance. That doesn\u2019t mean defending any of these choices, of course, but getting to the root of what it all means and why she was that way. We can\u2019t ignore how much of a heavy hand she had in the success of one of the greatest artists in all of history, and if their P\u00fabol Castle is also anything to go by, it also becomes clear just how deprived her life \u2013 aesthetically and in the corners of her mind \u2013 really was.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Fen Labalme \/ Roger Higgins, World Telegram) Fri 17 October 2025 9:30, UK Behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,596,89522,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-207880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-homepage","tag-salvador-dalu00ed","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}