In the late 1930s, Dalí was working on the production of Bacchanale with the dance troupe Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a successor of the original Ballets Russes after the death of its founder Serge Diaghilev. Described by Dalí as the first of “paranoiac” spectacles, it was also his first of many collaborations with the company. Bacchanale brought together the choreographer Léonide Massine, Dalí, who wrote the libretto and created set and costume designs and Coco Chanel, who made the costumes. Dalí had stayed at Coco Chanel’s villa at Cap Martin for several months in 1938, and it was during this time that the idea for the collaboration was born.

Based on Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, the story of Bacchanale combines historical characters such as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and the famed dancer and courtesan Lola Montez with the myth of Leda and the Swan. The ballet premiered in November 1939 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and subsequently traveled extensively in the United States. Jack Anderson described the response to the ballet: “The season's scandal was Bacchanale [...]. Dalí's decor was dominated by a huge swan with a hole in its breast through which dancers emerged, some in remarkable costumes. [...] Lola Montez wore harem trousers and a hoop skirt decorated with false teeth.” [1]

Ballerine en tête de mort depicts a ballerina in a lavish white dress, whose figure morphs into a skull, the positioning of her arms and costume doubling as eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth. This type of double imagery is characteristic of Dalí’s "paranoiac-critical method," which he formulated in 1930 and which involved self-induced hallucinations that would ignite his imagination and inspire his art. The resulting compositions, which are now among the most celebrated in the artist’s rich œuvre, play optical tricks on the mind of the viewer by creating worlds in which one object or figure is seamlessly suggested by the constellation of other objects. Analyzing Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical” imagery, Dawn Adès has noted: "His desire to give substance to the phantoms destined always to remain virtual led to one of the most sustained investigations into the relationship between vision, perception and representation of the century." [2]

The first owner of Ballerine en tête de mort was the French artist Georges Hugnet (1906–1974), who joined the Surrealist movement in 1933 after meeting André Breton. Uniquely multidisciplinary in his artistic practice, Hugnet pioneered the poem-collage, combining found images with newspaper text. Hugnet opened a bookbinding atelier, Le Livre-Object, where he collaborated with other artists to marry illustrations with poetry.

[1] J. Anderson, The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, New York, 1981, n.p.