09/12/2025
Ana Marie Dali
In looking into the archives of a Dali website I had back in 2004 for the 100th anniversary of Dali’s birth, I came across this very interesting article by author Tim McGirk. It appeared in the January 1989 issue of The Independent Magazine. McGirk is the author of what is in my opinion the best book ever written about Gala. It is titled Wicked Lady – Salvador Dali’s Muse.
Now enjoy this great story about Dali and his sister Ana Marie.
"Death was just another medium for Salvador Dalí's manipulation. He had splattered canvases with ink fired from a blunderbuss, smeared shapes with a live octopus, and even stuffed a rotting donkey inside a grand piano, so it was only natural that he should take a keen interest in the spectacle of his own death.
When doctors rushed the 84-year-old painter to hospital in the Catalonian town of Figueras last week, it was doubtful that he would survive. But he had defied their grim predictions before. Last November he was wheeled into the intensive care unit of a Barcelona clinic suffering from pneumonia and heart complications. On his fourth day in intensive care, he asked the nurses to plug in a television so that he could amuse himself by watching the erroneous reports of his impending death. His long moustache was carefully waxed beneath the beak-like oxygen mask that made him look like one of his own grotesque creations.
He rallied for several weeks but finally died on 23 January, listening to Wagner.
While the artist lay on his deathbed in Figueras, an introspective spinster, who wears her white hair tucked inside a silk turban, sat in a simple white-splashed villa beside the sea in Cadaques, where the painter had spent his childhood summers. She was Ana María, Dalí's sister and the sole surviving family member. Ana María waited by the telephone in the hope that Dalí, as a last gesture, might summon her to the hospital to make peace after a hatred that had endured more than half a century. "Even if he is dying, I refuse to see him unless he calls me," she had told a friend firmly. But when the telephone finally rang on Monday morning, it was to inform her that her brother had died.
Dalí and his sister had been feuding ever since the artist spat on his mother's portrait in a show of surrealist bravado, and ran off with Gala, an older married Russian woman whom the family despised.
Ana Maria had broken her vow once before, in October 1984, when Dali was nearly burned alive in an accident. That time, too, the doctors swore he would never recover. Ana María was kept informed by Dalí's guardians of his progress, but she began to suspect that they were deliberately trying to prevent her from seeing her brother. Dalí's private collection of paintings is worth many millions of pounds and there were plenty of people who had reason to fear that a deathbed reconciliation with Ana María might prompt him to alter his will.
Accompanied by her cousin, María Teresa, Ana María sneaked into the hospital through a rear door and rode the lift to the burn unit, where her brother lay in a private room, dangling like a marionette from all the electric wires and tubes. There are two wildly different versions of what happened next.
According to Ana María, her brother was alone in the room, untended. "He began to tremble violently with emotion when he saw me," she told friends and her cousin. "I was overwrought, too. I was also afraid that with his trembling he might pull loose the tubes and hurt himself. So, I kissed him on the forehead and slipped out."
The other version has it that when Dalí became dimly aware of his sister's presence beside him, he raised his arm as if to strike her and shouted: "Push off, you le***an!"
This rage between Dalí and his sister, whom he had once adored and painted into some of his most memorable early canvases, such as Girl at the Window or Girl Seated Seen From the Rear, was rooted deep within their strange childhood. Ana María was four years younger than her brother. When she was born in 1908, Salvador's morbid exhibitionism had already flowered, but through no fault of his own. His parents gave him the same name as a precocious older brother who died of meningitis. Young Salvador brimmed with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. "Many times, I have relived the life and death of this elder brother, whose traces were everywhere when I achieved awareness - in clothes, pictures, games..." Dalí later wrote.
As a result, he craved his parents' attention. He would pretend he was choking to death on a fishbone or kick little crawling Ana María in the head.
Salvador's father was a respected notary in Figueras, a robust man with a mercurial temper who was an easy victim of Salvador's bizarre games. He also had quirky ideas about s*x education. During his early teens, Salvador was shown a medical volume filled with colour pictures of people stricken with every kind of s*xual disease'. It happened that Salvador's mother died suddenly at about this time, and in his impressionable mind he began to associate her death with the grotesque images in the medical book. Nor did it help that Mr. Dalí turned around and unmarried his dead wife's sister, who had been sharing the house with them. Some biographers speculate that perhaps the father had been having an affair with his sister-in-law before his wife's death, and that Salvador may have spied them in the act. For Dalí, s*x was to be equated with disease and death; love could easily be transposed from a dead "double" to a live one. Whatever the reasons, he developed a deep loathing of physical contact with women or men.
With the re-marriage to Aunt Tieta, Salvador declared open revolt against his father. "Every day, I find some new way to drive my father to distraction, to rage, fright or humiliation, and make him think of me," he wrote. The younger Ana María, in a sense, became Dalí's caretaker. She chased away the grasshoppers which so terrified Salvador, bought the tickets to see Chaplin at the Figueras open-air cinema because her older brother was incapable of counting out change, and at home she answered the telephone, whose ring terrified him. He reciprocated by writing her erotic poems, and a villager in Cadaques, the village on the Costa Brava where the family spent their summers, claims he once strolled by a hidden beach and found the brother and sister embracing naked.
Local teachers had spotted Dalí's extraordinary drawing ability and recommended that his father inscribe him at the Fine Arts School in Madrid. Dalí lodged in the university residence in 1921, where he befriended the poet Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel, a philosophy student who was later to become a filmmaker. Lorca was immediately attracted to Dalí and tried to seduce him. Dalí claims he consented once but found so**my too painful.
Ian Gibson, the biographer of Lorca, said: "There's no doubt that Dalí was tremendously flattered by Lorca's attentions. He considered him a great poet."
It seemed that Dalí s experiences with Lorca left him even more s*xually confused. Every summer, he retreated from Madrid to Cadaques.
There he began painting portraits of Ana Maria, seen from the rear, that are innocent yet provocative. She had wide hips, lamb-like black hair and strong Mediterranean features that could have been drawn by Dalí's rival, Picasso.
In 1929, Dalí traveled to Paris to help Buñuel script and film "Un Chien Andalou" The film earned Buñuel and Dalí the admiration of André Breton and his surrealist followers, while scandalizing Paris society. Dalí returned to Catalonia that summer, and a few curious surrealists followed him down. There was the painter René Magritte and his wife, a gallery owner named Goemans, Buñuel, the poet Paul Eluard, Eluard's Russian wife Gala and their daughter. Ana Maria instantly felt that her position as muse and confidante was jeopardized by these "amoral beings". She wrote, rather melodramatically, that "the shine of the sun on the sea, the silver the olive leaves, everything trembled with fear when those strange people fixed them in the gaze of their red eyes. Their haste destroy the morality and the kindness of humans was fanatical."
What enraged Ana Maria was that her brother was trailing after Eluard's wife Gala, like a lovesick pet, and the Frenchman seemed to be encouraging him. Gala had an androgynous figure and dark eyes whose gaze, as Eluard said, could "pierce walls". Salvador strutted around with a gardenia behind his ear and wearing Ana Maria's long pearl necklace; he had abandoned his serene classical landscapes for feverish hallucinations. Ana Maria's anxiety grew when Eluard withdrew from Cadaques, leaving Gala behind with Salvador. She spread tales to her relatives and the villagers that Gala practiced witchcraft, that the Russian woman was an o***m trafficker who wanted to ensnare her brother.
She and Gala - who left Eluard and her daughter in the winter of 1929 to remain with Dalí until her death in 1982 - had more in common than either would like to confess. Both were fanatical believers in Dalí's genius; both sought to provide the half-mad painter with some anchor on reality; and both were possessive in the extreme. When Ana María lost Salvador to Gala that summer, she fretted for decades. Today, aged 80, she remains a spinster.
But Gala gave him something that Ana María, as a sister tangled up in Salvador's complicated family life, never could. As he once explained, Gala "knocked out the barriers of my childhood fancies, my death anxieties... She cured me of my self-destructive rage by offering herself as holocaust on the altar of my rage to live. I did not go mad, because she took over my madness." Instead of recoiling from Dali's s*xual peculiarities, she encouraged their expression on canvas.
Dali once claimed that Gala was the only woman with whom he could have s*x, and he describes their lo******ng with a surfeit of erotic detail. Friends of Gala claim this is only fiction: Dalí, they say, was a vo**ur. "Erotic masses" are what Dalí called his or**es, and he would arrange every variation of s*xual coupling imaginable. Sometimes the artist would ma******te as he watched; otherwise he would wait until his performers were on the point of reaching climax, then angrily banish them from his sight. Gala allowed free rein to Dalí's vo**urism.
In November 1929 Dalí left Cadaques to join Gala, who the month before had gone to Paris. Word reached Dalí's father and Ana María that Salvador, with typical excess, had publicly vowed to "spit" on the portrait of his mother. This outrage was too much for Dalí's father, who disowned him. Eventually, father and son were reconciled, but Ana María's hatred of Gala was so intense that it poisoned her relationship with Salvador. She accused Gala, unjustly, of reporting her to the military police, who dragged her away during the Civil War and tortured her.
The final break came after Ana Maria wrote Salvador Dalí As Seen by His Sister, which shattered Dalí's image of himself as a demented child genius who went around biting the heads off bats. Ana María portrays Salvador as a talented but ordinary little pest. Nevertheless, her adulation of him is undisguised. After that, Dalí forbade anyone to mention her name in his presence. He would venture into Cadaques from his Port Lligat home only when Ana María was in church. For 30 years, living over the hill from each other, sister and brother avoided each other. When Gala died, a cousin named Gonzalo Serraclara suggested that Dalí be reconciled with his sister. Dalí chased him from the house.
It would have been a happy ending if Dalí had made peace with his sister, yet to do so would have been an admission of defeat. There were many unpleasant secrets in the Dalí family household, and Salvador tried to overcome his terror as best he could through his art. In The Old Age of William Tell, which he executed soon after his father banished him, there is a sheet covering a man and two women, which could be interpreted as Dalí's father, the aunt and Ana María. The shadow of a lion, Dalí's symbol of desire, falls across the trio. Behind them are Gala and Dalí fleeing in shame. In a way, Dalí was fortunate to escape.”
The End
