An unique assemblage from a theatrical set designed and painted by Salvador Dalí for a 1939 ballet has been acquired by the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The auction lot included the backdrop curtain that is the largest work of art ever made by the surrealist master, plus four friezes and fours wings, for a total of 13 canvases. It is almost the complete set from the original staging, missing only the giant wooden swan which no longer survives. It sold at Bonhams Paris for €254,400 ($292,000).

In March 1939, Dalí was contracted to design the sets for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo’s production of Venusberg, a one-act ballet that used the Venusberg Bacchanale from the first act of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser as the score. It was a perfect commission for a surrealist. Dalí wrote the libretto, a Freudian flight of fantasy wherein King Ludwig II of Bavaria encounters Venus in the form of a fish-headed mermaid and then a dragon. He stabs the goddess, and she splashes him with her “libidinous poison” which drives his mad. He then hallucinates, among other things, a dancer emerging from a giant wooden swan from the Leda myth, his lover, famed courtesan Lola Montez, and the Three Graces as dressmakers’ mannequins.

Dalí was in New York at that time, so he created a scale model of the set and had it shipped to Monaco. Under Dalí’s supervision, Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo’s set designer Oreste Allegri and Prince Alexandre Schervachidze, head of the workshops, would execute his vision. The massive scenic backdrops for the mad king’s dreamscapes were laid out flat on the floor of the workshop and hand painted.

The backdrop constitutes the central and monumental element of this set imagined by Salvador Dalí. Over nine metres [30 feet] high and nearly eighteen metres [59 feet] wide, it unfolds a landscape that is at once mysterious and dreamlike, crossed by mythological, artistic and psychoanalytical references. At the centre rises majestically Mount Venus, occupying almost the entire height of the curtain. At its base, on the left, a waterfall flows into a calm pond. This presence of water, rare within this mineral and arid environment, introduces a pause in the landscape: it evokes both the source of life and the flow of time, elusive and continuous.

The symbolic mountain is pierced at its heart, revealing a tempietto and figures from the Italian Renaissance that reproduce the composition of Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin, itself inspired by the architecture of Donato Bramante. Yet here the scene seems emptied of its original meaning: there is neither union nor true celebration. Love is absent. This absence may be linked to the figure of the swan spreading its wings, once placed in front of the mountain, which referred to the myth of Leda and evoked both desire, temptation and the guilt associated with feminine sin.

To the left of the mountain, the carcass of a wrecked boat bears witness to an ancient drama that time seems gradually to erase. Nearby, a figure stands with an arm raised in an ambiguous posture: a call for help, a gesture of despair, or a final attempt at communication? To the right, in the distance, a desert stretches to the horizon line, punctuated by immense enigmatic rocks. This arid space intensifies the feeling of solitude and infinity so characteristic of Dalí’s landscapes.

The friezes and wings framed the spaces that transition from the stage to the backstage. Dalí employed a cabinet of curiosities motif, painting drawers, some open, some closed, and cubbies, some empty, some with figures including busts, skulls, ewers, his wife Gala, a reclining nude and more. The wings are an abstract, organic line design that suggests musical notes dancing in space.

In September of that year, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and the world about to plunge into war, the ballet’s name was changed from the Wagnerian Venusberg to the decidedly less German sounding Bacchanale. Dalí and Gala were in France then, and were unable to get to New York City for the premiere of the ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 9, 1939, where it was a huge hit and of course caused many pearls to be clutched.

The company would perform Bacchanale with Dalí’s set for the next two years, then for one-off productions in 1945 and the last one in 1967. When the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo disbanded in 1968, the set was donated to the Ballet Foundation in New York. They donated it to Butler University in Indianapolis where it remained from 1970 until 2018 when it was sold at Sotheby’s New York for a private collection in Spain which loaned it out for display three times in Spain and Italy.

Now that it has been acquired by the Dalí Museum, the Bacchanale backdrop and wings will have a new home where they can be exhibited surrounded by thousands of other works by Dalí. The museum is embarking on a major expansion this year. Construction begins in the fall on an addition that will add 35,000 square feet to the existing building. The timing could not be better for them to figure out an ideal space to display such a monumental testament to Dalí’s work on the stage.