In September 1929 Dali moved into the apartment at 7 Rue Becquerel in Paris’ Monmartre district that Paul Eluard had leased for Gala — with a view of the Montmartre windmills that would have thrilled Cervantes.

“This was a modern functionalist building,” he wrote in “The Secret Life”. “I considered this kind of architecture to be auto-punitive architecture, the architecture of poor people — and we were poor. So, not being able to have Louis XIV bureaus, we decided to live with immense windows and chromium tables with a lot of glass and mirrors.

“Gala had the gift of making everything ’shine’, and the moment she entered a place everything began furiously to sparkle. This almost monastic rigidity, meanwhile, excited my thirst for luxury even more. I felt like a cypress growing in a bathtub.”

Making his misery complete was his father’s fury over Salvador’s affair with Gala — he banished him from the family home permanently.

Papa could not have been happy, either, about his son’s scrawling the words “Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother” on a lithograph of the Sacred Heart he’d found and then putting it in a show.

In December the son received a letter from the father informing him that he was cut from the will, and his share of the family estate reassigned to his sister Ana Maria.

One source has said that Salvador responded to his banishment by shaving off his hair and burying it in the sand on the beach at Es Llane, but surely he didn’t come near Cadaques again for some time. In fact he wouldn’t see his father again for nearly two decades.

Dali’s reply to his father’s wrath, rather, was to paint “Accommodations of Desire”, seen above, in which some see the angry lion as Dali Senior, with the vulva made of ants representing Dali Junior’s fear of impotence.

In 1936, on the eve of his departure from Europe to spend the war years in America, Dali decided it was time to try and reconcile with the family. From “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”, here is how he described his return home from France, with the Spanish civil war still a fresh memory and a global conflict looming just ahead.

“I went to Figueras — that is to say, I crossed the whole of Spain. I found my country covered with ruins, nobly impoverished, with faith in its destiny revived, and with mourning engraved with a diamond in every heart.

“Knock, knock!

“‘Who goes there? Who is knocking?’

“‘It is I.’

“‘Who?’

“‘I, Salvador Dali, your son.

“That is how I knocked at my father’s door in his house of Cadaques, at 2 o’clock one morning. I embraced my family — my father, my aunt and my sister. They prepared anchovies, sausage, and tomatoes sprinkled with oil for me. I chewed my food, stupefied and terrorised: for I saw no traces of the revolution.”

Salvador, then aged 32, retired that night to the room where he spent his childhood, pacing back and forth, marvelling that everything was just as it had been. “Moved to tears”, he poked around in the pigeon-holes of his old secretary-cabinet.

In the bottom compartment he discovered the same random items he’d kept there — keys, buttons, a dented five-centimo coin, safety pins and the balls of dust that would always reappear immediately after his mother had cleaned the desk thoroughly.

“I pressed between my fingers several of those little wads of dust, of a deep purplish colour, and taking them close to the light which continued to shine on them with the same wanness as during the convalescences of my childhood, I examined them attentively. This wad of dust was stronger than anything, because it was outside of history; it was the very dynamite of time, capable of making history itself blow up, the violet flower of tradition!

“I turned round. I knew that behind me a reproduction in a round frame, above the bed, concealed a round moisture stain in this same spot. When I was small I would sometimes lift up this painting, and almost always a little spider would come running out. I tried this now. The spot had disappeared, but a little spider scurried out, exactly as when I was a small boy.”

Dali ruminated on the waste of war: In the Spanish conflict his sister had been tortured by a military-intelligence committee, a bomb had ripped a balcony from the house, and the floor tiles in the dining room were blackened by a fire over which occupying “anarchists” had cooked their meals.

But, like the large dining table that had vanished for two months and then been found again 20 kilometres away, and now covered the charred spot on the floor, everything was just as it had been before the “revolution”. Nothing had changed.

Gala and Eluard divorced in 1932 and she married Dali on August 30, 1934 in a civil ceremony at the municipal council headquarters in Paris’ XIV arrondissement. A church service waited another 26 years — until after Eluard died, thus voiding any reluctance to offend the Catholic Church.

Paul Eluard, who had first “introduced” Dali to Gala by showing him photos of her posing in the nude, was invited to attend the 1934 ceremony but declined. Biographer Ian Gibson surmised that, sharing the surrealist penchant for “free love”, Eluard would have found the rites trite and bourgeois.

In attendance as official witnesses, though, were the painters Yves Tanguy and André Gaston, the latter a resident of the building, at 7 Rue Gauguet, where Dali had his studio.

Art critic Robert Hughes described Gala as a “very nasty and very extravagant harpy”. Ian Gibson’s more balanced view ran along the lines of “intelligent, egoistic, superstitious, sexually shameless and of an unshakeable will”.

Gibson came to believe that Gala had decided immediately on meeting Salvador that, with her guidance, he could become surrealism’s new star, and wealthy too. Her devotion to him, he implied, had its pragmatic side from the start.

Dali admitted he was completely dependent on her, saying he would go insane if she ever left him. Other than himself, he said, only she was capable of “moderating and exalting my divine madness”. She was his “Angel of Equilibrium”.

“She is the rarest being to see, the superstar who cannot in any case be compared with La Callas or Greta Garbo, because one may see them often, whereas Gala is an invisible being, the anti-exhibitionist par excellence.”

He first glimpsed Gala wearing a bathing suit on the beach, with a delicate posterior accentuated by her wasp’s waist. According to one source, this is the rear view featured in his painting “Senicitas” (seen in this post), but elsewhere it’s claimed that this work dates from his army days in 1927, two years before Gala showed up.

At any rate, that day on the beach Dali sensed right away that the Russian-turned-elegant-Parisian was the living incarnation of the woman of his childhood dreams.

Here’s how she’s described in the 1942 autobiography “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”:

“One single being has reached a plane of life whose image is comparable to the serene perfections of the Renaissance, and this being happens to be precisely Gala, my wife, whom I had the miracle to choose.

“She is composed of those fleeting attitudes, of those Ninth Symphony-like facial expressions, which, reflecting the architectonic contours of a perfect soul, become crystallised on the very shore line of the flesh, at the skin’s surface, in the sea foam of the hierarchies of her own life, and which, having been classified, clarified by the most delicate breezes of the sentiments, harden, are organised, and become architecture in flesh and bone.

“And for this reason I can say of Gala seated that she resembles perfectly, that she is posed with the same grace as Il Tempietto di Bramante near the church of San Pietro in Montorio at Rome; for, like Stendhal in the Vatican, I too can measure exactly the slim columns of her pride, the tender and stubborn banisters of her childhood, and the divine stairways of her smile.

“And so, as I watch her from the corner of my eye during the long hours I spend huddled before my easel, I say to myself that she is as well painted as a Raphael or a Vermeer.

“The beings around us look as though they were not even finished, and so badly painted! Or rather, they look like those sordid caricatural sketches hastily drawn on cafe terraces by men with stomachs convulsed by hunger.”

“Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape”, 1934

On June 6, 1928, “Un Chien Andalou” had its premiere in Paris, and the avant-garde critics raved about it. The film, Dali boasted, “plunged like a dagger” into the city’s heart.

In November Dali’s first one-man show in the City of Lights was held at the Goemans Gallery, with 11 paintings on view. Camille Goemans had sent him an enthusiastic telegram in Cadaques saying he was prepared to buy three paintings of Dali’s choosing for 3,000 francs and exhibit all his work upon his return to Paris.

But it was between these events, and not in Paris, that Dali met Gala, who would set the course of his life on a considerably different tangent.

An address I’ve come across for Dali’s original apartment in Paris is 88 Rue de l’universite, though I’m not sure of the date. It would certainly have been in the late 1920s, likely around the time “Un Chien Andalou” premiered.

The building is pictured below, facing away toward the Seine. Not far from here is Goeman’s gallery.

This was “the dark apartment”, Dali wrote years later, “where I first discovered the intensity of Gala’s gaze”, one that he said Paul Eluard had characterised as “the look that pierces walls”.

And under the influence of that gaze, Dali added, he painted “The Sublime Moment” in 1938 (above left), “Telephone Grilled Sardines at the End of September” in 1939 (above right) — both discussed further in this post, and, in 1937, the picture below, “Herodias”.

Herodias was a Jewish princess descended from King Herod, but it’s more likely, judging from the imagery, that Dali was thinking of the mediaeval witchcraft cult that revered Herodias, daughter of Diana, the goddess of the hunt.

The flat on Rue de l’Universite is also where Dali painted “Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape” in 1934, seen at the top of this post and here in closer detail.

He’s portrayed Vermeer at an easel set out on the Ampurdan plain, where the boy Salvador, next to his nurse, strikes his usual pose in sailor suit holding a hoop. In the distance are forms of the sort Dali called simply “symbols”, specifically “symbolic of hierarchies”.

Another spectre familiar from his paintings of this period rises draped by a row of cypress trees and a tower, recalling the Pichot family’s Mill Tower and the belltowers of local churches.

According to the website Moodbook, journalist Cyrus Sulzberger of the family that owns the New York Times bought “Enigmatic Elements” at the Carnegie Institute surrealist exhibition in Philadelphia that same year. He paid for it in $5 installments and came to believe it brought him good luck. Later obliged to sell it, he realised his mistake and, not long before his death, arranged to buy it back again.

Among the jutting rocks of Cap Creus in 1930 Dali and Bunuel filmed segments of their second cinematic collaboration, “L’Age d’Or” (from a script spun as they told one another their dreams), using the local fishermen as extras. See this post about the splash the movie made in Paris.

Dali called the cape’s rugged seascape “grandiose geological delirium”. The lighthouse on the cape appears in Orson Welles’ “The Light at the Edge of the World”.

Cadaques has attracted artists since the late 1800s, and in Dali’s time Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso came to the haunted coast, not to see him but to create works of art of their own.

Below are “Port Alguer” from 1924, and a snapshot to match.

“The Font”, 1930

In January 1930, flush with the success of his sold-out show at the Goemans Gallery the previous month, Dali brought Gala here to Carry-le-Rouet on the Cote d’Azur where, until March 8, they took rooms at the Hotel du Chateau de Carry — “where no one could come and ferret us out”.

Carry-le-Rouet is today proudest of being the long-time summer home of the beloved film comedian Fernandel — whose portrait Dali would have painted, “disguised as a Velasquez dwarf”, had the war not intervened.

Gala was suffering with an unspecified gynaecological problem (she’d had herself sterilised after the birth of her and Paul Eluard’s daughter Cecile), but Dali kept busy with his work, including the painting “The Invisible Man” and the book “The Visible Woman”.

“We had the hallway stacked with wood,” Dali wrote in his 1942 biography, “so that our fireplace would never for a moment be without a fire — and so that no one could come and disturb us on the pretext of bringing us wood … For two months we did not once go outdoors!”

He and Gala would long after remember this stay as “one of the most active, exciting and frenzied periods of our lives”, often saying to each other, “You remember the time at Carry-le-Rouet?” Gala foresaw lean times ahead, but not for long.

In her readings of the tarot cards she saw a dark man with money. This, as it turned out, was the art philanthropist the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, from whom an offer of help indeed soon arrived.

On hotel stationery Dali wrote to the Viscount about selling one of the three versions he’d just completed of “Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion”, and to Luis Bunuel about his new ideas for “l’Age d’Or”, the film they’d begun scripting the summer before in Cadaques.

“The Great Masturbator”, 1930

Following their two months of hiding out in Carry-le-Rouet on the wintry Cote d’Azur, Dali and Gala had a quick visit with Garcia Lorca in Madrid and then, in April 1930, enjoyed something of a “honeymoon” on the Spanish coast at Torremolinos, whose beach is pictured above.

Today the resort village has a Salvador Dali Avenue, although there’s nothing unusual about that in Spanish towns. The Dalis’ abode was far from the street that would be named after him.

“We rented a fisherman’s cottage which overlooked a field of carnations on the edge of a cliff falling abruptly into the sea. This was our honeymoon of fire! Our skins became dark as those of the fisher folk.”

Their bed was as hard as dry bread, Dali wrote, but he came to appreciate the “gentle bruises and aches” that resulted, “for then one perceives that one has a body, and that one is naked.

“Gala, with a build like a boy’s, burned by the sun, would walk about the village with her breasts bare, and I had taken to wearing my necklace again. The fishermen of this region had no modesty of any kind, and would drop their pants a few metres from us to perform their physical functions.”

Aware that he was close to Malaga here, on Picasso’s native turf, Dali admired the men lining up to take a shit and taking their time about it, all the while trading “epic obscenities” and cheering their children’s sling-shot battles.

The fights “often ended with a few cracked skulls”, he observed.

“The sight of their children’s blood would awaken a little the personal hostilities among the defecators and, quickly pulling up their trousers and carefully readjusting their genital parts, which were always of handsome and well-developed proportions, they would start arguing among themselves … and would in turn end the polemic with one or two knife jabs.”

Amid such reveries Dali continued with “The Invisible Man” on canvas and completed “The Visible Woman” on paper.

Their surrealist friends came to visit, and in their bickering over left and right ideologies Dali could see that Spain was destined for civil war, a Medusa with snakes in her belly rather than on her head, the “serpents mutually strangulating one another in a continual iliac passion of death and of erection”.

Bad news arrived in a batch: the Goemans Gallery, which still owed him money, was going bankrupt; Bunuel was going ahead with “L’Age d’Or” without Dali; the carpenter building their house in Port Lligat wanted more cash. Salvador and Gala found themselves without enough change to even get home.

Dali strode out among the dunes alone, punching himself in the face, but in the tooth he knocked out he found the key to hope. He recognised “the advantage of my infirmities” and saw how necessity might give birth to opportunity.

In Paris Dali had been seeing Picasso and Éluard twice a week, but “society people” every day. His and Gala’s best friends there were Coco Chanel and the Sert girls, sculptor Roussie and Bettina, another fashion designer. Dali called Bettina and Roussie “fairy skeletons of the sveltest poetry”.

Hailing from Georgia, Roussie (Roussivani) was the second wife of the muralist Jose Maria Sert, who in 1936 prodded Salvador to paint “The Great Paranoiac”, seen above. Dali had adored the gossip at the soirees hosted by Sert’s first wife Missie, as well.

Well-connected with eligible American women living in Paris, Roussie Sert was also the enabling sister of the skirt-chasing Mdivani brothers, who styled themselves “princes”. Between them over the years they married Pola Negri, Barbara Hutton, Louise Astor Van Alen and several other American heiresses.

It was Alexis Mdivani who wed Van Alen and then Hutton’s first husband, and then Van Alen married another brother, Serge. A third brother, David, married the American actress Mae Murray.

They and their sisters Roussie Sert and Nina Huberich became known as the “marrying Mdivanis”.

In the photo from 1925, Roussie sits between her sister, on the left, and an unidentified friend.

Jose Maria Sert had a house three hours’ drive from Port Lligat, above the beach in the Mas Juny in Castell, in Palamós, which Salvador and Gala often visited for weeks at a time with the rest of the gang from Paris. Marlene Dietrich and Luchino Visconti were also among the guests.

“This period of summer enchantment”, Dali wrote, “the last days of happiness of Europe” before the Spanish civil war and the world war that followed, ended for him on August 1, 1935, when Alexis Mdivani and his then-lover the Baroness Maud von Thyssen-Bornemisza were killed in a car accident on the road from Palamos to Figueras.

Jose Maria refused to return to Castell afterward, and Roussie, Dali recalled, “was to die of grief over this four years later. To tell you how much I loved this being I shall tell you only that she resembled — as two ‘pearls of death’ resemble each other — the portrait of the young girl by Vermeer of Delft in The Hague Museum.” He doubtless refers to “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, painted in about 1665.

On one of his visits to see Sert, Dali was set up with a tiny studio in a stone fishermen’s hut that’s recently been “rediscovered” and turned into a minor tourist attraction. You can read about the “archaeological” project on this website, from which the two photos below originate.

It was recognised for its significance in art history following a 2003 municipal survey of obsolete structures that might be removed in the interest of nature conservation. Three years later someone noticed a depiction of a horse on the wall of this one-time stable and it seemed like Dali’s work. A search of the property records showed that it no doubt was.

The “Dali Shack” has a door described in Catalan as la porta torta, which might translate just as suitably as “the awry door” or “porthole”.

Sert sold the property in 1944 to Albert Puig Palau, and it became something of a pilgrimage destination for artists and intellectuals, and with them Dali returned.

“Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History”, painted in 1935-6, contains at least two architectural elements that Dali drew from Palamos, according to his biographer Ian Gibson.

He reckoned the district’s the Casino La Unión echoes in the porch of the Chirico-style building on the left, while the prominent structure in the centre was modelled on the Art Nouveau palace of the Ribera family. Both buildings disappeared years ago.