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Dalí‘s interests in the world of gastronomy are immortalized in a compilation of books dedicated, for the most part, to his muse. In the first instance, ‘Les dîners de Gala’ would come out in 1973 as a compendium of all the exotic dishes and the overflowing imagination that was served at the opulent dinners of the artist and Gala. A work in which certain surrealist reflections about their cuisine and the classic recipes of the great Parisian restaurants visited by the iconic creative duo, such as La Tour d’Argent and Maxim’s, are also diluted.
The pairing to that book came in 1977 with ‘The Wines of Gala‘, the liquid extension of his eccentric recipe book that speaks of the artist’s revolutionary way of conceiving wine under his obsession for sexuality and desire for food and wine, while sharing his passion for the gift of the gods, exploring the multiple myths of the grape.
Dalí’s wine guide, unlike his cookbook, has no text of its own, but was written by the editor Draeger, a friend and confidant of the artist. The visual content really prevails in the piece, with more than 140 illustrations by S.D., most of them sketches and details reprinted from previous paintings.
The surrealist master introduces in the work a series of eclectic metrics with which to group different wines of the world through innovative and Dalinian frameworks such as “wines of frivolity”, “wines of the impossible” and “wines of light”.
In Dalí’s book we can also find one of the most important works of his last ‘nuclear mystical’ phase with ‘The Sacrament of the Last Supper’ (1955), which places the iconic biblical scene in a dodecahedron before a Catalan coastal landscape in which he intermingles his devotion to Catholicism with his atomic age and his optical illusions.
