Dalí’s “Necrophiliac Spring,” Once Owned by Elsa Schiaparelli, Will Be Shown in the U.K. for the First Time at the V&A
A small, rarely traveled Salvador Dalí painting that helped shape one of 20th-century fashion’s most indelible Surrealist images is about to make its British debut. Dalí’s “Necrophiliac Spring” (1936) will be exhibited in the United Kingdom for the first time this spring at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum as part of “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” opening March 28 and running through November 8.
The exhibition, dedicated to Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and the evolution of her fashion house, brings together more than 200 objects spanning fashion, fine art, photography, and design. Within that wide-ranging survey, “Necrophiliac Spring” functions as a kind of hinge: a work of painting that became a blueprint for couture.
Painted in 1936, “Necrophiliac Spring” presents a flower-headed figure standing in a torn dress beside a fisherman. The scene draws on the landscape of Rosas near Port Lligat, Spain, a coastal setting closely associated with Dalí’s life and imagery. Schiaparelli owned the painting for years, and its torn-garment motif later surfaced in one of her most famous designs, the “Tear Dress,” introduced in 1938 with red trompe l’oeil slashes printed across the fabric.
Rosalind McKever, the V&A’s curator of paintings and drawings, has emphasized the work’s biographical charge for both artist and designer. Dalí, she noted, painted it soon after returning to Spain from Paris, and the setting references the beach at Rosas, near his home village of Port Lligat. McKever also points to the painting’s flower-headed figure as an echo of a striking anecdote Schiaparelli shared in her autobiography, “Shocking Life”: as a child, she claimed to have planted flower seeds in her nose and mouth in the hope of becoming more beautiful.
The Dalí canvas arrives in London with a notable exhibition history precisely because it has been shown so infrequently. After its debut in New York in 1936, it has appeared only sporadically; its most recent public outing was in 2011, in “Surrealism in Paris” at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler.
“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” also foregrounds the designer’s friendships and collaborations with artists who helped define Surrealism’s public face. McKever has described Dalí and Schiaparelli as friends from the mid-1930s, a relationship that produced some of the period’s most memorable fashion objects. The exhibition will include the “Shoe Hat,” the “Skeleton Dress,” and the “Lobster Dress,” designs that translate Surrealist wit and bodily unease into wearable form.
Beyond Dalí, the show incorporates works and collaborations linked to Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, and Man Ray, underscoring how Schiaparelli’s atelier operated as a meeting point for modernist art and commercial invention. McKever has also noted that Dalí viewed Schiaparelli’s couture salon on Place Vendôme as a central node of Surrealist Paris, contributing to its eccentric atmosphere.
Delphine Bellini, CEO of Schiaparelli, has framed the V&A presentation as an opportunity to place the house’s early experiments in dialogue with its contemporary direction under artistic director Daniel Roseberry, whose sculptural silhouettes and bold surfaces have revived Schiaparelli’s taste for the uncanny.
For museumgoers, the London debut of “Necrophiliac Spring” offers something rarer than a headline-grabbing loan: a chance to see, at close range, how a single image can migrate across mediums — from Dalí’s coastal dreamscape to Schiaparelli’s printed “tears” — and still feel disquietingly alive.
