Dalí Museum Acquires Dalí’s Largest Work: A Monumental Surrealist Ballet Set

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has snapped up the artist’s largest-ever work at auction, Artnet reports. Clocking in at over 20 meters high and 30 meters wide, Salvador Dalí’s Décor de théâtre pour Bacchanale, completed in 1939, was conceived by the artist as a backdrop for a Surrealist ballet, Bacchanale, choreographed by Léonide Massine and the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo. The work consists of thirteen separate panels, all of which were painstakingly painted by Dalí. The Dalí Museum acquired the work for €254,400 from Bonhams. After many years of concealment in a private collection, the set was exhibited in Madrid in 2023, used as a backdrop for a series of performances in 2024 and eventually exhibited in Milan in 2025. “The immersive nature of this largest of Salvador Dalí paintings purchased by the Dalí reflects the museum’s ongoing commitment to preserve and share in St. Petersburg Dalí’s legacy through dynamic, thoughtfully curated exhibitions,” Hank Hine, executive director of the Dalí Museum, told Artnet in a statement. “We will continue to advance how we engage audiences while demonstrating yet another dimension of Dalí’s work.” The artist drew his inspiration for the set from the erotic Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, and included a temple in the design inspired by Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin. The overall effect of the backdrop is intimidating: dancers arrived onstage through a doorway at the base of Dalí’s rendering of a Mount of Venus. In the background, the artist painted the picked-over bones of a once-magnificent ship. The ballet set is bordered by a series of painted cabinets. In certain compartments, Dalí painted skulls, mystery objects and disembodied arms and hands. The artist described the project overall as “the first paranoiac-critical ballet.”