posted December 17, 2014 04:30 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Vajra:
LeeLoo, Dancing Maenad is right, we did have a thread over at SU that described several (non-depressing) great love relationships, it's over here:
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum10/HTML/004931.html
We could put some of the astro data here as well. The Churchills would be a very good example, and several others too!
Thank you, Vajra 
I will start posting some of my favorite couples when it comes to passion and possible true love. I have some personal examples too, but unfortunately they don't have TOBs for both people: one would be my grandparents, I don't have the TOBs for none of them, and a few couples I know personally who really really have that vibe. I will start with some famous love stories and the 1st synastry, a classical, is Dali and Gala.
No TOB for her, sorry 
But at least we have his.
For the love of Gala
Never shy of trumpeting his own genius, Salvador Dali also lauded his 'twin god', Gala. Andrew Stephens examines the life, love and legacy of the man behind the moustache.
DURING a 1958 television interview, the lanky man with the googly eyes and extravagant moustache was quizzed by a sceptic. It wasn't the first time. Salvador Dali, self-proclaimed genius, was well used to flak even derision.
His promiscuous self-promotion, I'm-a-crazy-artist act and shameless commercialism they all drew the claws of those who, especially after 1940, forgot to take a good long look at what he was really all about: his art.
In the TV interview, the man questioning Dali's "ingenious flair for publicity" was cigarette-smoking host Mike Wallace himself a brazen promoter for the Philip Morris tobacco company ("I'm Mike Wallace," he would say on air, "the cigarette is Parliament."). Ironic, then, that he wanted to probe Dali's relentless hype machine. "Why do you behave the way that you do?" Wallace keeps asking as they skate from topic to topic, "Why?".
It was a futile question to ask of Salvador Dali because he was renowned for contradicting himself and embellishing stories. What Wallace ought to have been asking about, if he really wanted to understand the man, was Gala Dali's wife, his beloved "little olive" who barely rates a mention during the interview.
Gala, nee Diakonova, 10 years Dali's senior, was the love of his life, with whom he spent 53 of his 84 years. She was the canny Russian emigre who managed his lucrative finances; who would read to him while he painted, sometimes telling him (according to some accounts) what to paint; the feisty woman who, when she was 87, gave him a black eye after he whacked her with his cane; the liberated woman who took much younger lovers, well into her 70s.
Her name appears alongside Dali's on most of the paintings, signed Gala-Salvador Dali, a fact glossed over by many critics. But while she largely remains an enigma, there seems little doubt she played a pivotal role in Dali's extensive output: she didn't help make the work, but she was his constant source of inspiration.
"I have put my greatest treasure, Gala, in front of the imperialist structure of my genius," wrote Dali in a 1970 autobiography. The aficionados agree: somehow, Gala energised Dali at a deep level. "There is a great mystery around her," says Elliott King, art historian and Dali scholar, from Denver, Colorado. "She let Dali be the showman but she was the person behind the screen, making a lot of the decisions."
Ted Gott, senior curator of international art at the National Gallery of Victoria, who has been closely involved with the new retrospective, is equally fascinated by her role. "Whatever (Dali) found in Gala, it was his strength in life and she was his muse," he says. "It's important to come back and look at the work and there we find her again!"
Indeed, visitors to the Dali retrospective will be surprised at how frequently Gala turns up in the paintings and drawings and by the richness of the post-1940 paintings (43 years' worth) made after Dali abandoned surrealism: it's not all melting clocks, dreamscapes with baked beans, enlarged masturbatory hands and sagging Freudian archetypes. Such surrealist fare forms but an eight-year window in an incredibly rich 60-year career.
While we always have the art of Dali to refer back to for reappraisal, we cannot do this easily with Gala, who died in 1982, aged 88, and whose letters to lovers, her first husband and her Russian family have mostly been destroyed. She was never interviewed: she even refused Andy Warhol's ever-present tape recorder, dropping it in a vase of water. She kept herself closely to herself. Dali, as has been well documented, did quite the opposite.
He was the bizarre and puzzling character whom no one seemed able to quite pin down, yet also the man who had no qualms about lending his name and distinctive style to just about anything. On one hand, he drew attention to himself with nonsensical pranks, accounts of which are regularly hauled out (turning up to a Paris lecture in a white limo brimful with cauliflowers; wearing a diving suit, and almost suffocating, while giving a talk in London; doing a TV ad for Lanvin in which he mocks his own persona, saying "I am mad
for Lanvin chocolates").
On the other hand, he was a deeply serious and intellectual artist who worked ferociously, delving into myriad territories and aspiring to be as great a draughtsman as Durer, as great a master as any of the finest Renaissance painters.
A good deal of the antagonism that has endured towards Dali seems to extend all the way back to Andre Breton, self-styled leader of the 1920s-30s surrealist movement with which Dali was involved at the start of his career; and to influential critics Clement Greenberg and Robert Hughes, who both derided Dali's post-surrealist work. Michael Taylor writes in The Dali Renaissance (2008) that Breton embarked on a "concerted and vitriolic campaign" to discredit Dali started the poison darts flying by once bitchily making up an anagrammed nickname for Salvador Dali: Avida Dollars, which roughly translates as "eager for dollars". It was meant as a monumental putdown.
But Dali, ousted from the surrealists by Breton in 1933, took it delightedly as praise.
DURING an impossibly fecund career, Dali always craved attention. Even in a photo of him at art school in Madrid in 1923, he strives to look different: no smock or palette, just a floppy cravat and unfashionably long hair. He was eventually expelled because, writes one biographer, "convinced of his own talent he declared the examiners were not adequately qualified to assess him".
As with his most celebrated painting, the melting-camembert clocks in The Persistence of Memory (1931), Dali thereafter carefully choreographed things so he wouldn't be forgotten. He certainly hasn't been but was he an arrogant eccentric, or just an insecure actor?
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali, born in the Catalan coastal town of Figueres in 1904 (where he died in 1989), not only produced an astonishing portfolio of paintings, sculptures and drawings during his life. There were also film and theatre sets, a novel, diaries and several pseudo-autobiographies
and (according to just one biographer's list) designs for T-shirts, ties, tapestries, jewellery, cognac bottles, elephant ashtrays (for Air India), postage stamps (for Guyana), bathing suits, gilded oyster knives, hosiery, lipstick, Scotch bottles (for Old Angus) and perfume flasks (for Schiaparelli). He even whipped up the Chupa-Chup logo and did advertising for the Eurovision Song Contest. Single-handedly, he tried to demolish the teetering walls that divided nominally "high" and "low" culture. From the crass to the sublime, he made himself memorable, instantly identifiable.
Gala also became memorable in the way she was immortalised in so much of Dali's work. She appears often as a saint, certainly as an object of great reverence, with cool grace and an almost royal splendour. This is in stark contrast to the way she has been popularly portrayed, even demonised.
After she seduced Dali (or was it he her?) during a visit to Spain in 1929, she became Gala the adulterer (she was, at the time, married to French poet Paul Eluard, and was the mother of Cecile though she had also, during this marriage, had a tempestuous affair with artist Max Ernst). Eluard and the girl soon left, leaving Gala with her new love the start of her career as Gala the despised witch, the holder of the Dali empire's purse strings.
According to Dali groupie Ultra Violet, Gala would terrorise people and had even forced Dali into a menage a trois. Speaking at a 2004 symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (recorded in Taylor's Dali Renaissance) UV suggested that Gala was a difficult contrarian: "Whatever we said she would disagree."
Gala frequently threw cash in the faces of buyers and she used to come into Dali's studio, said UV, and command that "the green over there, I think it should be darker; and the hand over there, you should move it to the right".
But Dali "couldn't have lived without her". Said UV: "She was indispensable. Gala was Avida Dollars. It was not Dali."
In his sensational Wicked Lady: Salvador Dali's Muse (1989), journalist Tim McGirk is repeatedly scathing about the woman, whom he describes as a "bad-tempered, obnoxious and coarse" person who "shook (Dali) like a money tree" and was characterised by "guard-dog meanness".
But Dali loved her dearly: Frank Weyers writes in the potted history Dali (2005) that when the couple met in 1929, Dali was in a state of hysteria, shaving his armpits, painting himself blue, cutting up his shirt and smearing his body with goat dung and fish glue. He stuck red geraniums over his ear, too, to impress her.
"In Gala, Dali found an ideal partner without whom his hysteria might have become morbid," writes Weyers. She was not only the "longed-for perfect love" but "a vital therapist".
Everyone wants to imagine what she was really like: Carlos Rojas, in Salvador Dali, or The Art of Spitting on your Mother's Portrait (1993), describes Gala as "just another metaphor for the maternal uterus" in Dali's life. Although on one hand Dali believed he would be a hallucinating, miserable genius without his Gala, "on the other he admitted, 32 years after meeting her, that all his farcical incoherences came forth from his tragic desire to affirm his own existence" before his "twin god", Gala.
Ted Gott says he would have loved to have known Gala, if only to understand more deeply the genius of Dali (and he is convinced the man was a genius). Having worked on the Dali section of the 1993 Revolution by Night surrealist exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Gott developed a great love of the artist's work especially the later period dealing with nuclear physics, religion and classicism but nevertheless finds himself intrigued by the personalities behind the paintings.
"She was a highly intelligent, literate and well-read woman who had something," he muses. "We'll never know what she had. There aren't interviews, or diaries she will always be this mystical figure. She became, from the moment they met, the most central person in his life."
Gott says the problem with dealing with Dali and Gala is that Dali's construction of his persona was so encompassing that trying to find the truth behind it is impossible. "And in a way it's pointless: the persona is the truth. What do we gain by learning the mundane detail behind this fantastic piece of artifice? What's wrong with enjoyment of the artifice itself? He devoted his whole life to it. Let's enjoy it and thank him for it."
Critic Robert Hughes was not prepared to do that. Having written harshly about Dali in Time magazine in 1972, he returned to him in The Shock of the New television series and book in 1980, describing the artist as "the Catalan promoter" whose moustache was just a bodily trademark, "the only rival to Van Gogh's ear and Picasso's testicles".
"His success, large as it was, coincided with his decline as a serious artist," writes Hughes snidely of Dali's surrealist phase. "Painters often imitate themselves
but Dali did so with unusual zeal, and his celebrity arises from the way in which he fulfilled two ruling cliches about artists." These were the artist as Old Master (Raphael, Rubens) and the artist as Freak (Rimbaud, Van Gogh). "Dali's public image contrived to give a tacky, vivid caricature of both while fulfilling neither."
But as contemporary aficionados observe, Dali's showmanship and business acumen was something that has been celebrated in subsequent artists.
"They both (Dali and Gala) made a lot of money," says Gott. "Why can't an artist make money? We think it's fantastic when Jeff Koons makes a fortune, or Andy Warhol so why is it not fantastic for Salvador Dali to make money? Why is it all right for Picasso to be a millionaire but not Dali? I wish someone would tell me. Because Gala helped him make money and because they both enjoyed having money that somehow makes them bad people. I do not understand the double standard."
The same hypocrisy seems to apply to the artwork.
"There is this notion that anything painted after 1939 by Dali is not good," says Gott. "Nothing could be further from the truth. It's when Dali is just starting to get really interesting!"
Elliott King agrees. He discovered when he began an honours thesis in the late 1990s that virtually nothing had been written about "late Dali". "There was this grand landscape of uncharted territory," he recalls, still bemused. Now, he is thoroughly immersed in all things Dali he and his wife Emily even had a mock wedding at a Dali symposium in Britain in 2005, in which they both wore enormous eggs on their heads (a la Dali).
King worked on the big Dali conference and exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004 to mark the centenary of Dali's birth an event that seemed to signal a sea change in Dali scholarship, particularly in valuing the later work.
"The intellectual side of them was always overshadowed by the commercialism and the antics," he says. "Critics underplayed that by saying Dali had sold out and wasn't doing anything interesting, when the pieces really do have intelligent engagement with contemporary science and art movements.
"A lot of the great trends in art were things Dali anticipated. He was doing benday dot paintings before Lichtenstein, for example; he was doing shooting paintings before Niki de Saint Phalle; Coca-Cola and Mao before Warhol. There was this definite dialogue; he was the precursor to many things that are now esteemed in contemporary art. Even the merger of mass culture and high art his Venus de Milo with Drawers from 1936, the Lobster Telephone (1936) bring in commercial objects and say they are worthy of being high art."
Gott agrees and says that while Dali was living in the St Regis Hotel in Chelsea (which he did for six months of the year from 1949-79, renting an apartment with a studio) he would regularly hold court in the King Cole Bar downstairs.
"It basically became Dali's private bar," he says. "That's where he would meet all of these people. Andy Warhol and he became quite good friends; he was visited by (James) Rosenquist, Chuck Close and a teenage Jeff Koons. Even though the official art world in many ways turned against Dali
at the same time you find this older statesman being appreciated by younger artists yet to make their mark."
Beyond this, Dali also amassed his "court of miracles". Michael Taylor describes this as a "fluctuating cast of transvestites, hermaphrodites, dwarves, hunchbacks, nymphets, twins, glamorous models, minor actors and drug addicts", many of whom turned up later in Andy Warhol's Factory. (Warhol later said he didn't know who copied whom in having transvestites.)
But his primary focus was art. "Here was someone who didn't stay in his studio and do paintings and appear once a year at a 'vernissage' (a private exhibition preview)," says Gott. "Here was someone who didn't care less whether it was a pair of pantyhose or a major painting commission, it was all art. It was all grist to his mill.
"The artist existed in order to transform society at every level, in every way and every moment possible: that's what Dali stood for and perhaps that's why they came to soak up some of that liberated feeling."
WHERE, in all this bonhomie, was Gala?
"Gala might pop in for a few minutes but she wouldn't stick around," says Elliott King. "She was always up in the hotel rooms, or out shopping or meeting new prospective boyfriends
It is hard to find anyone who was close to Gala. She really stayed off by herself."
In his book Ghost Ships, Robert McNab writes that because she was so elusive, and most of her letters/writings have gone, we have almost no idea of what she sounded like, "no idea of her inner voice". "She survives, therefore, reflected in the eyes of others, a mute witness, an enigma", but one who was "extremely promiscuous and business-like about it".
Regardless, Gott says she was a fantastic partner for Dali. "Who will ever know the secrets to any couple's magnetism and why should we?" he asks. "Why should we peer into any marriage, take it apart and know what ticks? It's none of our business. What's important to know is that as a couple they were very successful and very creative."
Gala died at the age of 88 in 1982, a year after the fight at the Paris hotel in which she punched Dali. Her death devastated him, his health began to fail and his art work to dry up; when he was badly burnt in a fire in 1984, he gradually disappeared from public view until his own death four years later.
"It was a great love affair," says Gott. "The tragedy for Dali was living on after her death for another seven years."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/for-the-love-of-gala/2009/06/12/1244664839594.html
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I seem to have loved you in numberless forms...
Lindaland
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posted December 14, 2014 09:18 AM
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