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This spring, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is setting the world abuzz over the maison’s sculptural silhouettes and boundary-pushing designs. Now, New Yorkers can also get their Surrealist fashion fix—and discover the origin story of the Italian couturier’s most iconic looks—thanks to “Dalí: The Great Years, 1929–1939” at Di Donna’s Madison Avenue gallery. Open through June 13, this exhibition is the most significant presentation of Dalí’s work in New York since MoMA’s 2008 blockbuster and is the first to exclusively focus on the ’30s, a transformative decade in the Spanish artist’s life and career. During this time, Dalí formally aligned himself with the Surrealist group, established his artistic language, found the ultimate creative partner in his wife Gala, and amplified his public persona, cementing his fame for posterity.
The exhibition marks two personal milestones for Emmanuel Di Donna, who founded the gallery in 2010 to focus on European and American art from 1900 to 1970, with a Surrealist emphasis. For this show—the last in Di Donna’s Upper East Side space before merging with Pace and dealer David Schrader to form a joint secondary-market gallery—Di Donna decided to go off with a bang. “Every one of these pieces could be in a museum,” he said. Indeed, several of them already are. It took 10 years for Di Donna to assemble the show of more than 30 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, sourced from private collections and esteemed institutions, such as the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“It’s a narrow subject with a lot to say,” says Di Donna of the exhibition’s scope. The gallerist opted for a chronological organization, beginning with Dalí in Paris and ending with his move to New York. In between were frequent bouts of displacement due to both the Spanish Civil War and World War II, which challenged the artist’s œuvre and psyche and led to consequential encounters with other visionaries. Collaborations were key to Dalí’s dissemination of his art, which sought to materialize the unconscious through a distinctive melding of the rational and irrational, the fantastical and the dystopian.
As this influential decade (1929–1939) proved, fashion was a powerful vehicle for Dalí to translate his imagination into wearable art that would be seen by the masses. While many traditional artists eschewed commercial enterprises, Di Donna says Dalí harnessed its power: “The gallery walls were far from his only canvas. His art was meant to be diffused and shown, whether it’s through exhibitions, publications, or fashion.” Although there are no extant garments on view in “Dalí: The Great Years,” the seeds of his celebrated collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel are ever present.
Courtesy of Di Donna Gallery
Salvador Dalí, Paysage, 1931, Oil on canvas Private Collection © 2026 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society
Fashion became an inseparable part of Dalí’s practice. Before the artist was illustrating for magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, designing store window displays, and partnering with top jewelry and fashion designers, his early work already demonstrated an interest in dress. Laden with symbolism, garments and fashionable objects habitually appear in his artwork, perhaps most famously in the melting pocket watches of The Persistence of Memory (1931) or, more subtly, in Paysage (Landscape) (1931).
On view in the Di Donna exhibition, the latter work features a diminutive pink heel with a glass of milk in it, indicative of Dalí’s preoccupations with gender and sexuality. Beside the heel, a piece of fabric is draped over a branch. “The concept of hiding and revealing is extremely important in art and fashion,” says Di Donna, explaining one of the reasons fashion may have appealed so deeply to Dalí. “You can’t help but want to know what’s behind the fabric.”
The shape of the heel in Paysage (Landscape) is not far from the legendary upside-down Shoe-Hat he’d design for Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture Winter 1937–38 collection—but an even more direct reference to the ingenious accessory can be seen in Le Cannibalisme des objets (The Cannibalism of Objects) (1933), a work on paper at Di Donna. The title and the image of a man imbibing the inner contents of a shoe heighten the heel’s fetishistic associations.
Dalí and Schiaparelli’s first collaborative project came in 1935 with a powder compact resembling a telephone dial. Though the artist created magazine ads for the fashion designer’s lipsticks and perfumes, his most famous contributions came in the form of trompe-l’oeil garments, the first of which—the Bureau-Drawer Suit—debuted in Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture Winter 1936–37 collection. The idea began when Dalí gave the designer a drawing with the inscription: “Suit with semi-rigid, limp drawers, fabric imitating stripped oak, drawer handles in natural oak.”
Courtesy of Di Donna Gallery
Salvador Dalí, Téléphone homard, 1936/circa 77, Mixed media assemblage Private Collection © 2026 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society
Dalí’s and Schiaparelli’s following collaboration for the Haute Couture Summer 1937 collection was arguably their most renowned and controversial: the Lobster Dress. Dalí began incorporating the crustacean into his work during the early 1930s, including in an illustration for American Weekly where a man tries to put his hand on the earpiece of a phone, which has been replaced with a lobster. In 1936, the artist was commissioned by the great Surrealist patron, the British poet Edward James, to create the Lobster Telephone, also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone, of which several versions exist. (The one on view in Di Donna’s exhibition is from a planned 1970s reedition that was never realized.) For the telephone, the lobster’s tail, where its sexual organs are located, is placed directly over the mouthpiece; the lobster’s suggestive placement on Schiaparelli’s white organdy dress is, therefore, no coincidence (and was made all the more shocking when the Duchess of Windsor wore it in 1937).
Although Coco Chanel was a rival to Schiaparelli, Dalí also counted her among his closest friends. In 1938, when unable to return to Spain due to the Civil War, Dalí and Gala spent four months at La Pausa, Chanel’s summer estate on the French Riviera, where she hosted many cultural luminaries. Setting up temporary studios there, Dalí produced some of his most important works, which would be featured in a highly successful exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1939. (The gallerist was instrumental in garnering Dalí’s American success; in 1932, Dalí participated in his first group exhibition in New York there; one year later, Levy flanked his first solo show.)
Courtesy of Di Donna Gallery
Milada Mladova in Leonide Massine’s Bacchanale, no. 8. Photo © Maurice Seymore
While at La Pausa, Dalí began writing the libretto and designing the set and costumes (co-designed with Chanel) for Bacchanale, a ballet he conceived for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Due to the outbreak of World War II, the 1939 performance was relocated to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, resulting in a Ballets Russes designer having to remake the costumes. In his 1942 autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist wrote: “Chanel worked on my show with a wholehearted enthusiasm and created the most luxurious costumes that have ever been conceived for the theatre. She used real ermine, real jewels, and the gloves of Ludwig II of Bavaria were so heavily embroidered that we felt some anxiety as to whether the dancer would be able to dance with them on. But once more the work was to fail. The moment the war broke out the ballet company hurriedly left for America before Chanel and I had finished our work. In spite of the cables we sent to try to delay the performance the Bacchanale appeared at the Metropolitan with improvised costumes, and without my having seen even a single rehearsal!”
Nevertheless, Di Donna captures the spirit of this important moment with the remarkable painting, Ballerine en tête de mort (Ballerina in Skull) (circa 1939), depicting a skull whose teeth form the edge of a dancer’s hoop-skirt, evoking the one designed for Bacchanale. Chanel herself can be seen beside the painting in an archival photo. The exhibition additionally includes two studies for Bacchanale’s scenography and costumes. Skeletons also inspired an eye-catching evening dress featuring three-dimensional bones for Schiaparelli’s Le Cirque de Schiaparelli collection—in 1938, Dalí gave her a drawing of a skeleton woman with a note reading: “Dear Elsa, I REALLY love the idea of the bones on the outside…”
Courtesy of Di Donna Gallery
Coco Chanel with Dali’s Ballerine en tête de mort (circa 1939)
Dalí proved to be as confident as he was prophetic—for his eccentric designs, many of which Daniel Roseberry has revisited in his Schiaparelli revival, still surprise and delight nearly a century after their creation. The artist once proclaimed, “And if it is true that I love publicity, for a thousand and one reasons, all respectable, it is an undeniable fact that publicity loves me with a passion more violent than my own.”