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拍品专文
Painted in 1957, Ensorcellement - Les sept arts (Tragedy and Comedy -The Seven Lively Arts) is a striking work from Salvador Dalí’s mature career, which offers a glimpse into his unique, dynamic Surrealist language. Filled with unusual imagery and hybrid characters, the painting is one of the central works from Dalí’s artistic project known as Les sept arts (The Seven Arts), which consisted of seven individual paintings each depicting a dominant art form in modern society. By this stage of his career, Dalí was one of the most famous living artists in the world. His iconic style of painting was instantly recognizable to audiences across the globe and, combined with his flamboyant personality and enthusiastic embrace of the popular media, made Dalí a household name.
The Les sept arts paintings had their roots in a commission Dalí received in 1944 from the renowned Broadway producer and lyricist, Billy Rose, for his recently acquired Ziegfield Theatre in New York. At this time, Rose was in the process of creating his famous revue Seven Lively Arts, which subsequently became the name of his theatrical company. The production had transformed from his initial ideas for a satire of the different arts, to a large-scale theatrical extravaganza, featuring music by Igor Stravinsky and Cole Porter, including the classic tune ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.’ With sketches by Ben Hecht and George Kauffmann performed by a host of famous Broadway stars, the production was a boldly ambitious statement by Rose. To complement the show and further drive publicity, Rose – who was an avid collector of modern art – approached Dalí with an invitation to paint a special series of works to commemorate the opening of the theatre and celebrate these Seven Lively Arts.
Dalí was fascinated by the concept and quickly set to work on the commission, working in an upstairs office at the theatre during rehearsals. The suite of seven paintings took roughly six weeks to complete and were ready to hang in the foyer of the Ziegfeld theatre on opening night. They remained there for almost a decade, before being moved to Rose’s country estate in Mount Kisco, upstate New York, where they adorned the walls of the games room. Disaster struck in 1956, when a fire ripped through the building, destroying much of Rose’s beloved art collection, including the unique series of Dalí paintings for the Ziegfeld. Rose was devastated by the loss of the Les sept arts compositions, and used the money he received from the insurance payout to commission a new set of paintings from the artist, of which Ensorcellement - Les sept arts is one. Dalí readily agreed to the project, reportedly charging Rose the original fee they had struck upon in 1943 – the two had stayed in touch during the intervening years, with the artist creating a series of ink illustrations for Rose’s autobiography Wine, Women & Words in 1948.
The artist set to work on the new paintings in 1957, working from his suite at the St Regis Hotel in Manhattan, and took the opportunity to revise some of the imagery from the Les sept arts paintings. For example, Opéra was altered from a strange depiction of a frantic horse flying from the mouth of a monumental, stone-like figure across a dark, stormy sky, to a grand stage set that takes the form of an open mouth, a series of characters mid-performance at its center, seen as if viewed from the audience (Grand opéra, 1957). Similarly, Boogie-Woogie (also known as Jive) gave way to a more generalized dance scene (La Danse, 1957), in which Dalí whittled the number of figures down to a single couple who are connected by their long, stretched limbs, their bodies filled with tension as their dramatic movements take place against a desert-like landscape. The painting devoted to the topic of the Concert, meanwhile, was replaced by a new subject—that of Sports, in which a tame rhinoceros on towering stilt-like legs displays a baseball game within its body like a television screen.
This new imagery was more in-keeping with Dalí’s oeuvre from the mid-1950s, reflecting the shifts that had occurred in his style in the intervening years, incorporating more elongated forms, strange creatures and hybrid characters, each of whom display a dynamic sense of movement. Most notably, the painting dedicated to the subject of the Theater changed from an unusual L-shaped canvas, to the more typical rectangular support seen in the present work, and the title shifted to Ensorcellement, hinting at the ways in which the artform could enchant an audience.
In Ensorcellement, Dalí conjures a mysterious interpretation of the theatrical arts, centered on the personification of comedy and tragedy. These two foundational pillars of dramatic storytelling in the Western canon are typically represented by two faces or masks set in opposing expressions – one grinning, the other crying with despair. While here Dalí channels this tradition by applying the two typical expressions on either end of the central stretched form, he eschews the concept of mirror images and instead creates an unusual opposing pair. On one end, a comically aged figure smiles wildly, the movement emphasizing their deep-set wrinkles and sharp features, while behind, a more youthful, crying face is configured through the placement of wide eyes, a swooping nose and a downturned mouth together on the other end of the bulbous yellow form, their tears falling in thin rivulets.
The bizarre figure with its elongated, anamorphic head, is closely related to a striking figure that Dalí had created for another elaborate project from this period – the unrealized Disney animated film Destino, of 1947, which was proposed as a sequel to the studio’s famous Fantasia (1940). The oddness of the scene is further accentuated by the presence of two turtles with jewel-encrusted shells, who seem to support the opposing characters of tragedy and comedy above, transporting them through the scene, while a robed figure in the background follows their procession with a lit candle. As Ensorcellement illustrates, Dalí imbued his new suite of paintings dedicated to Les sept arts with a vivid sense of whimsy and humor, balancing the strangeness of his Surrealist imagery with a distinct sense of lightness.
The Les sept arts paintings had their roots in a commission Dalí received in 1944 from the renowned Broadway producer and lyricist, Billy Rose, for his recently acquired Ziegfield Theatre in New York. At this time, Rose was in the process of creating his famous revue Seven Lively Arts, which subsequently became the name of his theatrical company. The production had transformed from his initial ideas for a satire of the different arts, to a large-scale theatrical extravaganza, featuring music by Igor Stravinsky and Cole Porter, including the classic tune ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.’ With sketches by Ben Hecht and George Kauffmann performed by a host of famous Broadway stars, the production was a boldly ambitious statement by Rose. To complement the show and further drive publicity, Rose – who was an avid collector of modern art – approached Dalí with an invitation to paint a special series of works to commemorate the opening of the theatre and celebrate these Seven Lively Arts.
Dalí was fascinated by the concept and quickly set to work on the commission, working in an upstairs office at the theatre during rehearsals. The suite of seven paintings took roughly six weeks to complete and were ready to hang in the foyer of the Ziegfeld theatre on opening night. They remained there for almost a decade, before being moved to Rose’s country estate in Mount Kisco, upstate New York, where they adorned the walls of the games room. Disaster struck in 1956, when a fire ripped through the building, destroying much of Rose’s beloved art collection, including the unique series of Dalí paintings for the Ziegfeld. Rose was devastated by the loss of the Les sept arts compositions, and used the money he received from the insurance payout to commission a new set of paintings from the artist, of which Ensorcellement - Les sept arts is one. Dalí readily agreed to the project, reportedly charging Rose the original fee they had struck upon in 1943 – the two had stayed in touch during the intervening years, with the artist creating a series of ink illustrations for Rose’s autobiography Wine, Women & Words in 1948.
The artist set to work on the new paintings in 1957, working from his suite at the St Regis Hotel in Manhattan, and took the opportunity to revise some of the imagery from the Les sept arts paintings. For example, Opéra was altered from a strange depiction of a frantic horse flying from the mouth of a monumental, stone-like figure across a dark, stormy sky, to a grand stage set that takes the form of an open mouth, a series of characters mid-performance at its center, seen as if viewed from the audience (Grand opéra, 1957). Similarly, Boogie-Woogie (also known as Jive) gave way to a more generalized dance scene (La Danse, 1957), in which Dalí whittled the number of figures down to a single couple who are connected by their long, stretched limbs, their bodies filled with tension as their dramatic movements take place against a desert-like landscape. The painting devoted to the topic of the Concert, meanwhile, was replaced by a new subject—that of Sports, in which a tame rhinoceros on towering stilt-like legs displays a baseball game within its body like a television screen.
This new imagery was more in-keeping with Dalí’s oeuvre from the mid-1950s, reflecting the shifts that had occurred in his style in the intervening years, incorporating more elongated forms, strange creatures and hybrid characters, each of whom display a dynamic sense of movement. Most notably, the painting dedicated to the subject of the Theater changed from an unusual L-shaped canvas, to the more typical rectangular support seen in the present work, and the title shifted to Ensorcellement, hinting at the ways in which the artform could enchant an audience.
In Ensorcellement, Dalí conjures a mysterious interpretation of the theatrical arts, centered on the personification of comedy and tragedy. These two foundational pillars of dramatic storytelling in the Western canon are typically represented by two faces or masks set in opposing expressions – one grinning, the other crying with despair. While here Dalí channels this tradition by applying the two typical expressions on either end of the central stretched form, he eschews the concept of mirror images and instead creates an unusual opposing pair. On one end, a comically aged figure smiles wildly, the movement emphasizing their deep-set wrinkles and sharp features, while behind, a more youthful, crying face is configured through the placement of wide eyes, a swooping nose and a downturned mouth together on the other end of the bulbous yellow form, their tears falling in thin rivulets.
The bizarre figure with its elongated, anamorphic head, is closely related to a striking figure that Dalí had created for another elaborate project from this period – the unrealized Disney animated film Destino, of 1947, which was proposed as a sequel to the studio’s famous Fantasia (1940). The oddness of the scene is further accentuated by the presence of two turtles with jewel-encrusted shells, who seem to support the opposing characters of tragedy and comedy above, transporting them through the scene, while a robed figure in the background follows their procession with a lit candle. As Ensorcellement illustrates, Dalí imbued his new suite of paintings dedicated to Les sept arts with a vivid sense of whimsy and humor, balancing the strangeness of his Surrealist imagery with a distinct sense of lightness.