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Lot Essay
Robert, Nicolas and Olivier Descharnes have kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Made at the pinnacle of Dalí's involvement with the ballet, El Sombrero de Tres Picos is a fantastical oil painting that was made to serve as the design for the backcloth for Act 2 of the 1949 production of the ballet El Sombrero de Tres Picos at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. This ballet, known in French as Le Tricorne and in English as The Three-Cornered Hat is a well-known and highly popular ballet inspired by Pedro de Alarcón's nineteenth-century comic classic El sombrero de tres picos and first came to the stage in 1919 in a legendary production by Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. The ballet's score was written by the famous Spanish composer Manuel de Falla whom Dalí had met through his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca in the 1920s. For the 1919 production Léonide Massine had choreographed and Pablo Picasso had designed the sets.
In 1949, the emphasis of the production was on the strong Spanish nature of the ballet. Spanish dancing was enjoying huge popularity in the United States in the late 1940s and in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Ana Maria, Dalí was asked to provide an overtly Spanish feel to the production. His response in this work was to create a distinctly Spanish landscape, reminiscent in some respects of Joan Miró's The Farm, only here populated by typically Dalinean levitating trees, and floating sacks. These were motifs Dali also used in 1949 in the productions of the ballet Los sacos del Molinero and the stage-play Don Juan Tenorio.
El Sombrero de Tres Picos was painted soon after Dalí and his wife Gala had returned to Spain after eight years of living away from the country in New York. In depicting the Miller's House at the left hand side of this painting, Dalí has chosen to render it in the manner of his own Port Lligat home, the doors and windows of this typically whitewashed Spanish house mysteriously pulled away from the architecture to a distant perspectival point on the horizon like the Miller's sacks and the Cypress trees. It is a sense of fantastical levitation visually intended to echo the movement of the dancers on the stage before it.
Made at the pinnacle of Dalí's involvement with the ballet, El Sombrero de Tres Picos is a fantastical oil painting that was made to serve as the design for the backcloth for Act 2 of the 1949 production of the ballet El Sombrero de Tres Picos at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. This ballet, known in French as Le Tricorne and in English as The Three-Cornered Hat is a well-known and highly popular ballet inspired by Pedro de Alarcón's nineteenth-century comic classic El sombrero de tres picos and first came to the stage in 1919 in a legendary production by Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. The ballet's score was written by the famous Spanish composer Manuel de Falla whom Dalí had met through his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca in the 1920s. For the 1919 production Léonide Massine had choreographed and Pablo Picasso had designed the sets.
In 1949, the emphasis of the production was on the strong Spanish nature of the ballet. Spanish dancing was enjoying huge popularity in the United States in the late 1940s and in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Ana Maria, Dalí was asked to provide an overtly Spanish feel to the production. His response in this work was to create a distinctly Spanish landscape, reminiscent in some respects of Joan Miró's The Farm, only here populated by typically Dalinean levitating trees, and floating sacks. These were motifs Dali also used in 1949 in the productions of the ballet Los sacos del Molinero and the stage-play Don Juan Tenorio.
El Sombrero de Tres Picos was painted soon after Dalí and his wife Gala had returned to Spain after eight years of living away from the country in New York. In depicting the Miller's House at the left hand side of this painting, Dalí has chosen to render it in the manner of his own Port Lligat home, the doors and windows of this typically whitewashed Spanish house mysteriously pulled away from the architecture to a distant perspectival point on the horizon like the Miller's sacks and the Cypress trees. It is a sense of fantastical levitation visually intended to echo the movement of the dancers on the stage before it.