Dance (Rock and Roll)

"Dance"may not be the best picture of Salvador Dali, but perhaps with one of the most interesting stories. The first version of the canvas died in a fire, and the artist created a copy that played a key role in the fate of the family of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Initially, the work was called “The Art of the Boogie-Woogie” and was part of a series that Broadway impresario Billy Rose ordered to decorate the Siegfeld Theater before the premiere of the musical revue “Seven Living Arts” in 1944. Salvador Dali worked in the workshop, equipped in the theater. On the original canvas were depicted several crooked, emaciated figures, frozen in the middle of a certain corridor, rather, in suffering than in joy. A flaming tuba was placed between them, and mysterious figures in the background.

Later, the entire cycle of paintings was moved to the Rose Mansion in Mount Kisco, a suburb of New York. However, in 1956 there was a fire in the house, and the work was lost. Upon learning of this, the painter - by that time already renowned for the whole world - offered to write new ones in deference to the customer for the same price as the originals.

Dali created a new cycle already in Spanish Port-Ligat, making some changes to the composition. In “Dance” only two figures remained, the tuba disappeared, the background became different - a pair of dancers placed in a barren landscape typical of the surrealist. The name has changed, now the painting is called “Dance” or “Rock and Roll”. The series embellished Rose’s Manhattan apartment, but he later sold the work.

The man who bought "Dance" from the impresario, put it up for auction at Sotheby's in New York on May 14, 1985 for 209 thousand dollars (taking into account inflation, now it is about 490 thousand). It is not known who bought the painting then, but by 1988 it was part of the collection of Maria Victoria Enao - the wife of Pablo Escobar, founder of the cocaine empire, one of the richest people in the world, whose terrorist campaigns paralyzed Colombia.

In her memoirs, published in 2018, the wife of the drug lord writes that collecting became for her something of a refuge from the atmosphere of violence and fear that prevailed around, and buying a Dali painting was especially important. “It seemed incredible to me that at 22 I could have such a work of art in my house”- she recalls. The woman claims that she did not know about the scale of the crimes of Escobar, but she does not try to deny them, and shortly before the book came out she publicly apologized for the pain caused to people.

In the apartment of the Escobar couple, Dali's painting hung in a “privileged place” - the library - where it was visible from several points of view. There she was at the moment when a car filled with explosives blew up near the house. The mafioso himself was not in the building, but his family managed to escape. "Dance" remained unharmed.

Victoria Enao moved the painting to her sister's house in another area of Medellin. But this place was also attacked - in 1993 it was set on fire by members of the Los Pepes group hostile to Escobar.

Initially, Victoria Enao decided that the “Dance” was destroyed, but in December of the same year — after Escobar’s death — she found out that the arsonists had taken the canvas away. Soon she received a message from the head of Los Pepes, Carlos Castaño Gila, that he agreed to return the picture so that the widow could pay off her husband's enemies.

Henao rejected the offer, remembering her spouse to avoid any potentially dangerous situations. "On the day when I die," she recalls the words of Escobar, "give them all that remains so that they do not kill you and the children." According to the woman, this gesture was to convince her husband's antagonists that she was not a threat, and to compensate them for the costs of fighting the drug lord. It seems that it was a success: Victoria Enao with her family was able to safely leave Colombia and settle in Argentina. “The last thing I know about Dance is that Carlos phoned several dealers in Bogota and asked them for help in selling work to a collector abroad,” she writes.

In 1994, "Dance" was put up for sale at Christie's in London. In provenance, Billy Rose and other collectors were listed as previous owners, but the names of the seller or Escobar were not named. The auction house put the picture a high pre-sale estimate of 625 thousand. 195 dollars. As a result, Japanese businessman Teizo Morohashi, the founder of the XEBIO sporting goods retail network, acquired it for an unknown amount.

In general, he owned about 330 paintings, sculptures, engravings and other works of Salvador Dali. Later, he donated them along with seventy works by other artists to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Morohasi, which opened in 1999 in Fukushima Prefecture. Now the gallery receives about 50 thousand visitors a year.

Perhaps Dali, who appreciated humor, beauty and unbelievable, would get pleasure from a strange and adventurous journey that “Dance” made in order to end up in a museum honoring the work of the Spanish surrealist.