Oil on canvas; 72 x 92.5 cm<\/p>\n
1957<\/p>\n
In 1934, Dal\u00ed 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.
\nThe oil painting shown here, ‘Femmes M\u00e9tamorphos\u00e9es \u2013 Les sept arts’, is part of a series from 1957, which depicts the liberal arts. In 1944, Dal\u00ed 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\u2019s 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 Dal\u00ed 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 Dal\u00ed was commissioned to capture all of the arts on canvas.
\nIn 1957, seven of the original paintings were destroyed during a fire at the Ziegfeld Theatre whereupon Rose asked Dal\u00ed to paint replacements. ‘Femmes metamorphoses’, the painting shown here, was also among these new versions, which did not consistently correspond with the original motifs.
\nThe painting shows Dal\u00ed\u2019s fascination for the world of show business and furthermore for the United States\u2019 spirited and modern culture. Of the seven arts which the painter has depicted in his series, ‘Femmes m\u00e9tamorphos\u00e9es’ represents Dal\u00ed\u2019s 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, Dal\u00ed\u2019s 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.
\nThe fact that Dal\u00ed 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\u2019s claws act also as a deterrent and Dal\u00ed, 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.<\/p>\n
Salvador Dal\u00ed 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.
\nSigmund Freud\u2019s work had a big influence on Dal\u00ed\u2019s oeuvre and had fascinated him since his years of study, as Dal\u00ed had always suffered from strong hallucinations. Over the years Dal\u00ed had developed a pictorial language, which combined elements of dreams and the subconscious in a way that was reminiscent of the Old Masters.
\nEventually, his eccentric behaviour and his controversial opinions led to a break with the Surrealistic Group. But Dal\u00ed 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Material Oil on canvas; 72 x 92.5 cm Dating 1957 About the artwork In 1934, Dal\u00ed 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1881,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.thedoldergrand.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}