Femmes métamorphosées- Les sept arts

Material

Oil on canvas; 72 x 92.5 cm

Dating

1957

About the artwork

In 1934, Dalí travelled to America for the first time. Rumour has it that he wore a life jacket throughout the whole cruise and chained himself to his paintings. After this first visit, many more followed, as working in the United States proofed to be lucrative and promising for the eccentric artist, who led a lavish and expensive lifestyle.
The oil painting shown here, ‘Femmes Métamorphosées – Les sept arts’, is part of a series from 1957, which depicts the liberal arts. In 1944, Dalí had been given the task by his friend and theatre impresario Billy Rose to paint a seven part series of the liberal arts. The paintings were meant to decorate the entrance hall of the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York during the performance of Cole Porter’s fancy stage play ‘The Seven Lively Arts’. The pompous play, which had its first showing in December 1944, was intended to inaugurate the legendary Ziegfeld Theatre. Rose was well aware of the effect of his collaboration with Dalí and hoped to promote the costly production thereby. The stage performance included a potpourri of the arts and consisted of music, dance, cinematic elements, radio, opera and ballet. As a painter, Salvador Dalí was commissioned to capture all of the arts on canvas.
In 1957, seven of the original paintings were destroyed during a fire at the Ziegfeld Theatre whereupon Rose asked Dalí to paint replacements. ‘Femmes metamorphoses’, the painting shown here, was also among these new versions, which did not consistently correspond with the original motifs.
The painting shows Dalí’s fascination for the world of show business and furthermore for the United States’ spirited and modern culture. Of the seven arts which the painter has depicted in his series, ‘Femmes métamorphosées’ represents Dalí’s vision of the ballet. His bizarre insect and lobster ballet dancers are in no way reminiscent of traditional, well-proportioned dancing female bodies as painted by, for example, Edgar Degas. On the contrary, Dalí’s anthropomorphic ballerinas arose from a metamorphosis and dance over the canvas as hybrids. But despite their grotesque form, they do not seem repulsive or awkward. Rather, the observer perceives them as delicate, celestial creatures lost in reverie.
The fact that Dalí chose lobsters and ants is no coincidence, as both are reoccurring motifs within his oeuvre. In his own world of thoughts, the lobster represented an eroticised object, which he often depicted in combination with a woman. But the lobster’s claws act also as a deterrent and Dalí, in a Freudian interpretation, connected them with fear of castration and the vagina dentata. Ants had fascinated the artists since he had observed them digesting dead animals back when he was a child. They perform the same task in many of his works, thereby representing transience and death. This information reveals the otherwise harmonious painting in a different light and adds additional suspense.

About the artist

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter, graphic designer, author, sculptor and stage designer. Although he passed the entrance examination for the Royal Academy San Fernando in Madrid in 1921, he preferred to self-study and eventually in 1926 got expelled from the Academy due to his rebellious nature. He moved back to Figueras and focused on painting. At that time, his style was a mixture of Futurism and Surrealism, which he had gotten to know when he had visited Paris for the first time in 1926. During his next trip to Paris in 1929 he became acquainted with the Surrealistic Group and, as a driving force of Surrealism, rose to one of the most prominent painters of the 20th century.
Sigmund Freud’s work had a big influence on Dalí’s oeuvre and had fascinated him since his years of study, as Dalí had always suffered from strong hallucinations. Over the years Dalí had developed a pictorial language, which combined elements of dreams and the subconscious in a way that was reminiscent of the Old Masters.
Eventually, his eccentric behaviour and his controversial opinions led to a break with the Surrealistic Group. But Dalí was not only a gifted painter but also a clever businessman. He had already planned his next career move and had higher ambitions: he wanted to take the United States by storm. In the U.S. he ultimately reached superstar heights and expanded his field of activity to ballet, opera, film, fashion, jewellery and advertising.