Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was an internationally renowned Spanish Surrealist who mined the subconscious for his enigmatic drawings, paintings, and sculpture executed with great technical precision. Born in Figueras in Catalonia, Spain, Dalí was encouraged to explore his interest in art at a young age. His early artistic influences included Impressionism and Renaissance masterworks. Dalí eventually discovered more avant grade movements such as Cubism, Dada, and Futurism when he studied fine art at the Real Academia de Bellas Arts de San Fernando in Madrid starting in 1921. His academic career was inconsistent due to suspensions and his eventual expulsion after refusing to take an exam in art history. Nevertheless, Dalí developed a very unique personal aesthetic using precise draughtsmanship and technical skill.

Dalí traveled to Paris for the first time in 1926, meeting Pablo Picasso and visiting the Louvre. Dalí’s style would be shaped by Picasso, and fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró in the years to come. By 1927, Dalí’s work reflected his interest in Surrealism, and by 1929 he was a contributing artist in the group founded by André Breton.

The present work, Ballerine en tete de mort was painted in 1939 and relates to a ballet production entitled Bacchanale by Les ballets russes de Monte Carlo. Dalí’s collaboration with the ballet company began in the autumn of 1938, during a four-month stay at Coco Chanel’s villa, La Pausa, in Roquebrune, Cap Martin (fig. 1). The surrealistic ballet was based on the opening scene of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser from 1845. Dalí was fascinated by Wagner and his great patron, the ‘mad’ King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the central protagonist in the ballet. Bacchanale was conceived as a hallucination of Ludwig II of Bavaria, with supporting characters from Greek Mythology mingled with historical figures like Lola Montez (Ludwig’s grandfather’s mistress). For the highly unconventional ballet, Dalí designed the grand stage sets, costumes, and composed a libretto.

The figure depicted in Dalí’s composition is based on the ballet character of Lola Montez. Montez was a stage name for Eliza Gilbert (1821-1861), an Irish dancer and actress, and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. For the Bacchanale ballet, the Montez character wore a costume designed by Chanel that featured harem trousers beneath a hoop skirt adorned with teeth-like decorations along its circumference. In Dalí’s painting, the figure wears a similar costume and poses seductively with her arms raised above her head. The painting acts as a dual image, with the figure’s arms and the black mantilla forming the eyes of the skull, a black scarf around her neck suggesting the cracked nasal passage, and the hem of her dress transforming into the rotting teeth. The figure and the skull share a luminous shade of white, emphasizing the connection between the body and the gruesome skeletal remains.

Dalí frequently used the iconography of skulls during this period as a symbol of death and a reminder of our mortality. The imagery of skulls and skeletons were repeated throughout the enormous stage curtain design for the ballet. The morose skeletons were painted within a large architectural framing structure that surrounds the central image of a winged swan, whose crumbling ivory body mirrors the cracked skull in the painting.

The present work was completed during a very productive and ripe stage of Dalí’s career. It reflects key characteristics of the artist’s technique of the paranoiac-critical method of painting. Dalí defined this technique as a ‘spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical-interpretive association of delirious phenomena’ (Dalí, quoted in A. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 134-5). Paramount to the practice was the use of double or simultaneous images, which presented numerous subjective interpretations of a work of art. The goal was to disorient and cause viewers to question their acceptance of the rational world.

Bacchanale was originally set to open in London, but plans changed with the outbreak of war in September 1939. The production had its debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on November 9, 1939. The project was influential for Dalí as he continued to explore Surrealist iconography throughout his career in the wide range of mediums in which he worked.