Dali Unpacked

During the Second World War, when Surrealism and its progenitor, psychoanalysis, were in full, disquieting bloom, the choreographer Léonide Massine collaborated with Salvador Dali on several ballets, including one, “Mad Tristan” (1944), set to excerpts from Wagner’s great opera. At the beginning of the piece, according to Edwin Denby’s review, there was “a horribly confused acrobatic pas de deux with Spirits of the Dead like shivering maniacs and Spirits of Love like enormous dandelions in seed milling about.” The evening ended with “Tristan dying for love as upstage his own repulsive mummy is lowered into a vault caressed by white wormlike dismembered living arms.” For Act I, Dali painted a vast backdrop on which Tristan (presumably) appears with a dandelion head. Isolde holds out huge, flayed-looking, horror-movie hands to her beloved.