Before we just wanted to let you know that there are a few references to sexual activity in this episode

So it might not be great listening for kids

Welcome to significant others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we hear about one of the most important figures of the surrealist art

movement. This woman, who influenced everything from French poetry to American film and advertising was actually a Russian expatriate who wasn't an artist at all.

Married for nearly 50 years to a man with whom she only slept once,

mother of a movement who abandoned her own child,

credited painter who never held a brush,

this time on significant others.

Meet Gala Dully.

Imagine that your husband, a poet, drags you and your young daughter to a holiday at the beach with a bunch of his friends, all artists, and some new guy you've never met before, but who makes paintings your husband finds interesting.

You show up to the beach and the painter is wearing clothes he's carefully cut to expose his

shoulder, nipple, and belly button.

For Cologne, he's applied a homemade concoction of fish glue and goat shit,

and he shaved his armpits roughly on purpose, because he likes the way the blood looks when it dries.

Every time he opens his mouth to speak, he can't stop laughing hysterically.

And he's wearing a pearl necklace, swimming shorts, and a red geranium tucked behind one ear.

This is after he rethought his outfit and toned it down.

You find him unbearably obnoxious. His whole sh stick feels like a performance.

Little do you know you will soon give up everything for him. Gala Dali was born Elena Ivanovna Diakinova in Russia in 1894.

When she was 10, her father went off to dig for gold in Siberia, which apparently at that time was a thing, and he perished.

Some think this ceded an early fixation on money and security in the woman who would come to control a vast

fortune. But her mother remarried a man with money and still she was bent on escape.

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