Mural Painting for Helena Rubinstein "Fantastic Landscape – Heroic Noon" 

This is one of a series of three paintings Salvador Dalí made about the life of cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein while he was in the United States during World War II. Rubinstein’s youth, at the time of her departure from her native Poland, is depicted in the traveler in Dawn. At the height of her success, she is the giant in Heroic Noon. And her old age is shown in Evening, with a figure sinking into the landscape. The giant’s legs are planted firmly on the earth, while her upper body melds into the clouds that dominate the heavens. Birds decorating her blue robe soar into the sky to form her face. Rubinstein boasted that she made a million dollars by releasing blue balloons carrying samples of her new perfume into the New York sky. The painting also resembles an illustration from a seventeenth century alchemical book that had been highlighted by André Breton, a Surrealist movement leader who had criticized Salvador Dalí for being overly obsessed with money.
(NAKAMURA Naoaki)