Salvador Dalí

Cécile Eluard, Paris (the artist's stepdaughter)
Acquired by the present owner in London in 1989

New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Salvador Dalí, 1910-1965, 1965, no. 112

Robert Descharnes, Dalí, L'œuvre et l'homme, Lausanne, 1984, illustrated p. 275
Robert Descharnes & Gilles Néret, Salvador Dali 1904-1989, The Paintings, 1904-1946, Cologne, 1994, vol. I, no. 833, illustrated p. 369

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals one small line of retouching to the rightermost tree below the flower garland and there is an uneven layer of varnish which causes some areas to fluoresce. There are a few flecks of paint loss and tiny holes to the extreme edges (not visible when framed) due to previous framing. There is some surface dirt in places and this work would benefit from a clean. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the blues are slightly brighter in the original and the yellows slightly warmer.
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Based on Wagner's grand and dramatic opera Tristan und Isolde premiered in 1865, Dalí's reinterpretation of the famous romance is a Surrealist twist on an iconic tale of Western culture. Tristan fou, or Mad Tristan - as the artist decided to rename the opera, lending it a rather psychoanalytic feel in line with Surrealist preoccupations - was premiered on 15^th December 1944 and performed by the International Ballet in New York. Choreographed by the Russian Léonide Massine, the principal choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and whom Dalí met in the mid-1930s, this spectacle was executed during one of the artist's most prolific periods experimenting with the interdisciplinary arts. Elevating the artist to an even greater level of international acclaim and stardom, Dalí and his wife Gala left Europe for the United States in July 1940, where they lived until July 1948.

The present work is a design for the backdrop of the first act of the ballet, and the artist employs some of the iconography for which he is most famous. In the visual design of the ballet, Dalí not only creates a parallel with the traditional love story between Tristan and Isolde, the latter dying of grief in the final act of the opera, but also echoes Classical myth and especially the story of Apollo and Daphne as retold in Ovid's Metamorphoses. As viewers we are confronted with an array of parallel tree-trunks on the lower half of the foreground, our eyes slowly centring upon their human heads and outstretched limbs, powerful expressions of human vitality. The figures appear anguished, in a state of unrest and metamorphosis, in amongst a varied assortment of flowers, visual allusions to nature and mutation. These three hybrid figures recall the myth of Daphne, forever transformed into a laurel tree due to Apollo's lustful desire, and echoes Antonio del Pollaiuolo's rendition of the theme (fig. 1). The viewers are puzzled, and Dalí offers no clues as to whether these figures might suddenly mutate into real humans or whether they are destined to become static trees. Dalí invokes a range of rich and varied imagery: erotic, human, and emotional sensations in a total art work appealing to the all the senses.

Edwin Denby, a journalist of the time, tells of the way in which 'fantastic backdrops, costumes, stage effects tumble out over the stage for half an hour in frenzied profusion [...] a proliferation of decoration no one in the world but Dalí can rival' ('The Ballet: Dalí to the Hilt', in The New York Herald Tribune, 16^th December 1944). The audiences of the time must surely have been mesmerised and captivated by yet another of the artist's visual masterpieces.