Dalí was extensively involved in ballet and theatre, first designing for shows as early as 1927 and frequently entering these collaborations throughout his career.
The oil-on-canvas L'Œil Fleuri was part of the extravagant décor for the 1944 ballet production Tristan Fou (Mad Tristan). It was described by Dalí as "The First Paranoiac Ballet based on the Eternal Myth of Love in Death". Tristan has been driven insane with love, and in this state he sees himself slowly devoured by Isolde's Chimera, a horrible and awesome transformation of his beloved. Haunting and intense, the eyes of L’Œil Fleuri draw attention to Dalí’s obsession with perception, and his attempts to produce a symbolic language capable of communicating his inner thoughts.
The spectacular monumental painting Spellbound is the result of a unique collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí. Hitchcock's Oscar-winning movie, Spellbound, 1945, starred two of Hollywood's biggest names, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, and was one of the very first films to deal with Freudian psychoanalysis.
The painting was used as the background to the filming of the Spellbound dream sequence which vividly captured the illusory nature of the subconscious state, where reality becomes embellished with suppressed thoughts and the hidden workings of the mind.
Dalí was a natural choice for this film because he was deeply interested in psychoanalysis as a subject, and had not only met with Freud, but had even portrayed him in previous works of art. As Hitchcock himself said "I could have taken De Chirico or Max Ernst, but no one was as imaginative and extravagant as Dalí".
Dalí used his creative genius to challenge preconceived notions of reality and normality, and effectively expressed a dreamworld based around the recurring image of an eye.
