Salvador Dalí upset by his meeting with Gala in volume 2 of the intimate comic strip by Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie

For this second volume dedicated to the painting giant Salvador Dalí, the two authors plunge us into the throes of the artist’s desire, a major source of inspiration, and recount the shock of his meeting with his muse Gala Eluard, who will deflowering, at 25 years old.

After a first volume devoted to Dalí Before Gala from the childhood of the Catalan genius in Figueras until his arrival in Paris, Julie Birmant (screenplay), awarded the René Goscinny prize at the last Angoulême festival, and Clément Oubrerie (drawing) look in this second volume at the decisive meeting of the mustachioed painter with his muse of all eternity, Gala.

In January 1929, Salvador Dalí is 25 years old and still a virgin. The author that year of the painting THE Great Masturbator, relieves himself in compulsive torrid erotic fantasies.

He is also a quitter, at the last moment, he lets his accomplice Luis Buñuel present their film alone in Paris An Andalusian dogdescribed as “first great surrealist film” by André Breton, the theorist of the movement whose hundredth anniversary is being celebrated this year. Without a word for his accomplice Buñuel, Dalí therefore returns to the small Spanish village of Cadaquès, where he has spent all his summers since his birth, to “paint his visions” for an exhibition.

It was there, during a visit from the poet Paul Eluard, that Dalí met his wife Gala Eluard. He is, from then on, as if possessed by the one he “was waiting”although it revives in him tenacious morbid impulses towards women.

On the verge of madness, he does not hesitate to cause trouble to get noticed: he tears his clothes like a punk, hangs a ring in his ear and creates an animal fragrance based on goat droppings to seduce. Already visible, beneath his clumsiness, is the master of provocation that he will become.

Between Gala and Dalíthe sexual tension is all-consuming. But “the other side of desire is death”reasons the painter, who goes backwards. Now, the most burning expression of Gala’s desire is that he “make it die”! Suffice to say that the two found each other. Luckily, Eluard is a sharing man, who elegantly gives his blessing to the two lovebirds… who will only consummate after long weeks of flirting, at the conclusion of this volume 2.

For his part, André Breton falls under the spell of this “genius” artist capable of plunging the public straight into his delusions, by transforming his dreams into artistic creations. Like the surrealists, who intended to restore its place to the unconscious, the young painter in fact gave free rein to his hallucinatory visions and his singular perceptions, even allowing false memories to surface without ever restraining them. As for his surprising theory on the reasons for the success of The Angelus by Millet (a pornographic painting, no less), she has everything to seduce Breton.

So much for the scenario, which therefore advances, like the first volume, not in a linear way but by plunging us, through little-known anecdotes, into the tortured psyche of the author of the Soft Watchesmany of whose paintings are reproduced here. By blurring the boundaries between unconscious and reality in their images and their story, the authors subtly continue their quest for truth about one of the giants of painting. Who will become in the next volume a king artist of marketing coup with global success.

“DalíVolume 2 – Gala” by Julie Birmant (screenplay) and Clément Oubrerie (drawing) was published in September by Dargaud