This month, Salvador Dalí’s largest ever painting, a monumental stage set measuring 65 by 100 feet, will head to auction in Paris. The work, which comes from a private collection, will lead Bonhams’s fourth annual sale dedicated to Surrealism on Thursday, March 26 and is estimated to bring $236,000–$350,000.
Dalí conceived the 13-panel set for “Bacchanale,” a Surrealist production created for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. (He also wrote the libretto and devised some of the costumes). Key collaborators included Léonide Massine, choreographer and director of the Ballets Russes; Coco Chanel, who designed costumes and accessories; and Prince Alexandre Schervachidze, legendary scenographer for the Ballets Russes, who oversaw production of the set at the company’s workshop in Monte Carlo.
The ballet had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in November of 1939. Because of the war in Europe, Dalí was unable to attend himself, and Chanel refused to send her costumes. Nevertheless, it was well received and subsequently toured the US.
The artist most synonymous with Surrealism in the public imagination (to the irritation of the movement’s founder, André Breton), Dalí is best known for hyperrealist paintings and fetishistic objects like his 1938 Lobster Telephone. He defined “Bacchanale” as his first paranoiac-critical ballet, a reference to the “paranoiac-critical method”—involving a self-induced state of paranoid delusion—by which he created his images.
Painted with near-photographic precision, the set features a central image of Mount Venus (the mythical Venusberg of German folklore). Behind it stretches the Ampurdan Plain, a rocky waste near Dalí’s birthplace in Spain, and in the far distance rises the temple seen in Raphael’s 1504 painting The Marriage of the Virgin. A gigantic wooden swan, through whose torn-open breast dancers emerged onto the stage, was originally part of the set; it was destroyed in 1968.
The sale will also feature paintings and works on paper by European Surrealist masters like Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Jane Graverol, André Masson, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia. Highlights will include Tête en l’air, a c. 1945 painting by Graverol (estimate: $30,000-45,000) and a collection of 11 paintings and works of paper by Picabia, among them La Polonaise, a 1940 oil on panel from the former collection of Olga Picabia (estimate: $230,000-350,000).
