Gala caught Dali'a breath instantly with her elegant style and intelligent attitude in their first meeting. The chemistry showed right in the painting that Dali was painting at that time. Gala and Dali met in the summer of 1929. In that year, Dali's paintings were full of flourishing sexual symbols. "This historic meeting was accompanied by a fit of extreme madness. Dali was in such a state of constant exaltation that every time he started to speak to Gala he burst into insane laughter" (Neret, 22). When Paul Eluard and Gala Eluard came to Cadaque's to visit Dali, he was painting "The Lugubrious Game."
 
 

	The sexual images are shown with the distorted genital and the hidden symbol of sexual intercourse. "The finger that looks like penis reaches to the anus where is covered with ants; the face with the mouth of labia shape present both of Dali's desire for and fear of sex" (Shanes, 48). From those disordered piecemeal images and mixing of illusion and reality, we can sense Dali's unstable mental state, hysteric, tense nerve because of occupying by aphrodisiac. His guests were all worried that Dali would have a nervous breakdown. "The painting was a synthesis of Dali's phobias and presented the typical Dalinain motifs: the grasshopper, the lion, the pebbles, the snail, and the lips of the vulva" (Gilles Neret, 23). At the very moment Dali meets Gala, the desire for wanting her starts to burn in Dali's heart. The painting shows the combination of his desire and fear struggle in the image of the painting and also the result, hysteria, in the structure. Dali had believed for his whole life that for Gala's sake he did not go mad in the summer of 1929 as other people suspected; instead, he went mad about Gala.
Intimacy with Gala brings Dali a new and sudden shock. His fear of venereal diseases and impotence threaten him more serious than ever. Therefore, Their first intercourse motivates him to paint another masterpiece. In the fall of 1929, after his first sexual intercourse with Gala and after her leaving for Paris, Dali locked himself in the studio and painted his another controversial masterpiece "The Great Masturbator."      The picture bears witness to Dali's first encounter with Gala and the state in which she left him-midway between 'hard' and 'soft'" (Neret, 28). Actually, the composition is based on a chromolithograph of a woman smelling a lily; in Dali's hands, however, it inevitably assumes an entirely different meaning. At the same time, it mingles fresh memories of his momentous meeting with Gala. "The Great Masturbator" is a sort of "soft" self-portrait, in which Dali is visibly exhausted, as soft as a wad of chewing tobacco, ants and a harvest-spider run over his face. But this look of suffering finds an explanation in the face of a woman positioned for fellatio: with Gala he had experienced ecstasy!	¡ "The great masturbator"¨ (1929) Image source: http://www.mmlab.ktu.lt/Dali/page01.html