The Largest Salvador Dalí Painting to Be Auctioned
At roughly six stories high, the painting Salvador Dalí created as a stage set in 1939 is his largest ever. This massive artwork served as the backdrop forBacchanale, a ballet that premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. On March 26, this painting will be auctioned in Bonhams’ annual Surrealism sale. It’s expected to fetch between €200,000 and €300,000 (roughly $232,000 and $348,000).
The artwork “immerses the viewer in Dalí’s surreal universe,” Emilie Millon, head of Bonhams’ Impressionist and modern art department in Paris, tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “It unfolds a landscape that is at once mysterious and dreamlike, interwoven with mythological, artistic and psychoanalytic references.”
Featuring four canvases and 13 panels, the painting measures roughly 66 feet by 98 feet. The central image is the mythical Mount of Venus, while the background features the Ampurdan Plain, “a rocky waste near Dalí’s birthplace in Spain,” per ARTnews’ Anne Doran.
A temple based on Raphael’s 1504 paintingThe Marriage of the Virginis also visible in the distance. According to Artsy’s Katherine McGrath, “the accompanying side panels are covered with recurring motifs in Dalí’s work, including small skulls, skeletal limbs and empty eyes.”
The piece once featured a massive wooden swan overlaying the Mount of Venus. The bird was a “symbol of sin and desire,” per a statement from Bonhams. However, this part of the set was destroyed years ago.
A Historical Artwork with Rich Background
The large-scale artwork was last auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2018, when it sold for $162,500—twice as high as the $80,000 estimate. In recent years, it’s been exhibited at several museums in Madrid and Milan.
Dalí was involved in many aspects ofBacchanale. In addition to designing the sets, he also wrote the libretto, designed many of the costumes and oversaw creative decision-making ahead of the ballet’s premiere. “Dalí defined it as his first paranoiac-critical ballet, a work in which he poured all his ideas about a total work of art,” writes Bonhams.
Léonide Massine choreographed the performance, and Coco Chanel designed some of the costumes—though her creations never made it from Paris to New York due to the beginning of World War II. Dalí himself didn’t attend the premiere because of the war.
The ballet is based on the Wagner operaTannhäuserand “details the dreams of mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria in which stories from Greek mythology, most prominently Leda and the Swan, mingle with historical figures like famed courtesan Lola Montez,” according to the Sotheby’s lot listing. “The stage set is executed with sensitivity and delicacy, all the while underscoring the iconic elements so celebrated in [Dalí’s] oeuvre that have come to define him as a pioneer of Surrealism.”
Salvador Dalí and the Surrealist Movement
Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí was a major figure in the Surrealist movement, which developed in the years after World War I. Surrealist artists concerned themselves with exploring the unconscious, and their work often featured unexpected or dreamlike imagery.
A talented artist from a young age, Dalí made his way to Paris and began earning international acclaim in the early 1930s. Though he experimented with everything from performance art to jewelry design to fiction writing, he is best known for his Surrealist paintings such asThe Persistence of MemoryandThe Elephants. Dalí also developed a reputation for his eccentricity, as Stanley Meisler wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2005.
“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí,” Dalí wrote in 1953, per Smithsonian.
Bonhams’ Annual Surrealism Sale
The upcoming auction is Bonhams’ fourth annual Surrealism sale. It will also feature works by Man Ray, Francis Picabia, André Masson and Leonor Fini. Last year’s auction brought in around $1.2 million.
