Dalí Painting That Inspired Schiaparelli Dress To Be Shown In UK For First Time The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Dalí's“Necrophiliac Spring” Heads to the V&A for a Schiaparelli Exhibition - Its First UK Showing

A Salvador Dalí painting with a storied fashion-world provenance is set to make its UK debut at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) this spring. Dalí's“Necrophiliac Spring” (1936) will appear in“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” the museum's exhibition devoted to the Italian couturière Elsa Schiaparelli, opening March 28 and running through November 1.

The Surrealist canvas is more than a headline loan. It once belonged to Schiaparelli herself and is closely tied to one of her most recognizable garments: the“Tears Dress” (1938), now in the V&A's collection. The dress is printed with trompe l'oeil tears and paired with a veil whose“rips” were carefully cut out and lined in pink and magenta, according to the museum. The tear motif was specially designed by Dalí, underscoring how directly the artist's imagery could migrate into Schiaparelli's couture.

The V&A's curatorial research has also surfaced a period document that places the painting inside Schiaparelli's own domestic world: a photograph by Mark Shaw published in Life magazine in November 1953, showing“Necrophiliac Spring” displayed in her Paris home.

Painted in 1936,“Necrophiliac Spring” presents a flower-headed figure and a fisherman on a beach thought to be at Rosas, near Dalí's home village of Port Lligat on Spain's Costa Brava. The work was first exhibited in New York in 1936. Its most recent public appearance was at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, where it featured in the 2011 exhibition“Surrealism in Paris.” In 2012, the painting sold at Sotheby's New York for $16.3 million. It will be shown at the V&A on loan from a private collection.

The painting's arrival helps sharpen the exhibition's central argument: that Schiaparelli's practice was not merely influenced by modern art, but actively entangled with it. Rosalind McKever, the V&A curator of paintings and drawings, describes the“Tears Dress” as occupying a central section of the show that examines Schiaparelli's relationships with artists including Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, and Leonor Fini.

Those collaborations, McKever notes, extended beyond garments. Giacometti designed buttons for Schiaparelli, while Fini worked with her on perfume bottles - evidence of a designer building a total visual culture in dialogue with the avant-garde.“Wonderful work has been done by fashion historians, but it's been really interesting to come at Schiaparelli from [an art history] angle,” McKever has said.

Schiaparelli's appetite for modernism ran across movements. McKever points to the designer's early interest in Futurism, sparked by hearing the movement's founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti speak in Rome. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Schiaparelli pursued ideas of speed and modern life in clothing that could feel“aerodynamic,” including designs for aviator Amy Johnson.

Surrealism, however, became her most enduring artistic affinity. Schiaparelli cultivated close ties with Dalí, who even produced a pink version of his Mae West lips sofa for her salon and boutique at Place Vendome in Paris in the late 1930s - a concept linked to the British patron Edward James. Her involvement went beyond commissioning: Schiaparelli also organized the 1942 New York exhibition“First Papers of Surrealism” at the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies in Manhattan. While André Breton and Marcel Duchamp are credited with curating the show, McKever emphasizes that the initiative was Schiaparelli's.

In that context,“Necrophiliac Spring” functions as more than a rare Dalí on a museum wall. It is a material trace of a designer who moved through the Surrealist circle with unusual proximity - and who translated its imagery into couture that still reads as psychologically charged, witty, and unsettling nearly a century later.

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