Dalí vol. 1 - Before Gala by Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Europe Comics on October 25, 2023

Dalí is the first installment of a graphic biography of Salvador Dali. It begins with Dali’s childhood and follows him to age 22. The story depicts Dali as a young man who is tormented by grasshoppers. His father wants him to find an occupation that will produce a reliable income but recognizes that his son is too spacy for the business world and eventually basks in the glory of his son’s success.

Before Dali becomes known in the art world, his father sends him to art school in Madrid, hoping his son will at least earn a living by teaching drawing. Deciding that he looks like a sewer rat and hoping to blend in with his new friends, including Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, Dali gets a Rudolph Valentino haircut, changes his wardrobe, and learns to drink cocktails, including one of his own bizarre invention. He still stands out, in part because he is obsessed with female armpits. I don’t know if the armpit kink is true, but the story gives the sense that the reader is getting to know the real Dali.

Dali is expelled when, after being asked to draw a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, he draws a scale (he admires the balance in the sculpture and is told to draw what he sees). He is accused of being a political revolutionary in a turbulent period of Spain’s history, is tossed into jail, and uses his notoriety to score a show with a gallery in Barcelona. He isn’t gay but he has sex with Lorca by proxy when he shags a woman who Lorca chooses for him.

Dali earns more shows and becomes an artistic hit in Catalonia, although Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie do not try to reproduce Dali’s work. The reader will need to look elsewhere to get a sense of Dali’s early style.

Buñuel is introduced to surrealism in Paris. During a visit to Catalonia, Buñuel introduces surrealism to Dali.

When Dali finally visits Paris, he flees from a bordello after seeing the women as praying mantises who want to devour him. I appreciated the graphic renderings of Dali’s nightmares and fantasies. Dali also discovers that random Parisian women will not satisfy his requests to display their armpits.

Dali clearly lived an interesting life. So far, Birmant and Oubrerie appear to be doing it justice in an abbreviated fashion, although I can’t say that I know much about Dali or art in general. The graphic style of Dalí is similar to the style of most graphic stories. When Dali visits an art museum and admires Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the painting is rendered more as a blur than a reproduction of the original, although a greater effort is made to showcase a small portion that captures Dali’s attention. I’m a bit surprised that the first installment of a graphic series about Dali doesn’t focus more on Dali’s early work — it barely gives a sense of the art that earned so much praise — but the volume has value as an introduction to Dali the man, if not Dali the artist.

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