Salvador Dalí and dance

The Spanish artist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) is known as a surrealist painter: however, he also created or contributed the script, costumes and set designs to a number of ballets, and dance is a motif often found in his painting.

The theme of this ballet centered on King Ludwig II of Bavaria and his visions as he was losing his mind.

[2] In his youth Dalí found great inspiration in classical music concerts, theater, and ballet.

[4] In 1926, one of Dali's letters to Federico Garcia Lorca, one of his best friends, he admits that after a long day of painting he would go to dance the Charleston in the evening.

Dalí describes Garcia Lorca's funeral as a spectacle in which his friend was dancing a horizontal ballet as they walked his casket down the streets.

Based on Dalí’s autobiography, where he narrates his escape from the revolution in Barcelona in 1935, there was a moment when he was about to be killed and in the background he could hear the sound of a phonograph playing El Bello danubio azul ("The Blue Danube"); critics believe that this moment inspired Rompecabezas de otoño.

[9] The person posing in El escritorio antropomorfo (1936) models a typical dance pose that was popularly practiced in the Limón technique (“José Limón's approach to dance is based on the technique and movement philosophy of Doris Humphrey, who was his mentor and his artistic adviser.