Watch Dali's dream sequence for Hitchock's Spellbound

Watch a trailer for Dali's Disney collaboration Destino

Watch Dali and Buñuel's L'Age D'Or

Watch Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou

See Salvador Dali on TV show What's My Line

In the summer of 1936 Harpo Marx, the beaming, curly-headed buffoon and the most anarchic of the Marx brothers, made a visit to Europe. One of his admirers was the Surrealist painter Salvador DalÍ, who considered the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers to be the “summit of the evolution of comic cinema”.

DalÍ travelled to Paris specially to meet Harpo at a party. The meeting was a success and the two men, both wildly flamboyant showmen, remained in touch. A few months later, DalÍ sent Harpo a handmade Christmas present. It was a harp, decorated with gilded ornamentation, but with barbed wire for strings and teaspoons and forks for tuning knobs, all wrapped in Cellophane.

Harpo was delighted had a photograph taken of himself seemingly playing it, with bandages on his fingers as if he had injured himself while plucking the strings. This was sent to DalÍ with an invitation to visit him if he were ever in California.

Within a month DalÍ was in Hollywood, where he announced to reporters that he intended to make a portrait of Harpo. For years DalÍ had been entranced by Harpo’s hyperactive character on film and his stunts, such as bringing a steaming hot cup of coffee out of his trouser pocket or producing a candle lit at both ends from inside his coat. To DalÍ, Harpo’s surrealist humour perfectly matched his own carefully cultivated image as the living embodiment of Surrealism.

On DalÍ’s arrival Harpo rose to the challenge of shocking the artist. Their meeting took place in the garden of Harpo’s Los Angeles home. DalÍ later wrote: “He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the centre of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least 500 harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp.”

DalÍ declared that he was entranced by Harpo’s beauty during the portrait sittings that followed, and Groucho Marx later joked that DalÍ “was in love with my brother – in a nice way”. The friendship grew. With DalÍ’s wife, Gala, acting as their interpreter (talking in German with Harpo and translating into French for her husband and vice versa), they began collaborating on an idea for a Surrealist film that would star the Marx brothers and possibly the artist himself.

Although the film was never made, some of the images and ideas that the artist worked on with Harpo still exist and can be seen in a major new Tate Modern exhibition, DalÍ & Film,which explores the close relationship between cinema and the paintings of Salvador DalÍ. The story of DalÍ’s unexpected collaboration with Harpo Marx is told in the essay by Michael R. Taylor that appears in the accompanying book of the same name.

With a chronological display of more than 60 of DalÍ’s paintings as well as the artist’s major film projects and associated drawings, photographs and manuscripts, the exhibition reveals the extent to which cinema contributed to DalÍ’s understanding of both the power and the uses of illusion. DalÍ’s fascination with the medium was deep and persistent. He was passionate about films, embracing not only the more elitist modernist films but also the films of popular mainstream cinema.

In essence, what appealed to him seems to have been the poetic magic of film and its ability to transform the reality we see before our eyes into something more imaginative. He emphasised the transformative powers of film: “A lump of sugar on the screen can become larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings,” he wrote. In one of his late films he tried to film gooseflesh close-up on a female breast, attempting to transform it with this odd perspective into some fantastic other object that was altogether different from reality.

Naturally, DalÍ loved Hollywood, where the border between reality and fantasy merged. During his first trip there to see Harpo Marx in 1937 he sent a postcard from Los Angeles to his fellow Surrealist André Breton, saying: “I’m in Hollywood, where I’ve made contact with the three American Surrealists, Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B. DeMille. I believe I’ve intoxicated them suitably and hope that the possibilities for Surrealism here will become a reality.”

DalÍ’s generation, born in the 1900s, was the first to grow up with the cinema. By the 1920s Hollywood was dazzling cinema audiences all round the globe. Dreams wafted upwards in the darkness to join the mirages of silver light. And particularly for DalÍ, it created irresistible illusions, like an opiate.

The Hollywood community of the motion picture industry, with its lavish social events, also appealed to the theatrically minded DalÍ, who took full advantage at all times of opportunities for self-promotion. By the time of his 1937 visit DalÍ’s was already a household name. He had had exhibitions at the Levy Gallery in New York, and had sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art. He had been on the cover of Time magazine, and his theatrical antics tended to make headlines in the newspapers.

When his dealer, Julian Levy, put on a DalÍ show in Los Angeles, DalÍ himself hosted a masquerade party in Pebble Beach which was attended by several members of the Hollywood elite, including Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers and Bing Crosby.

A few months later Twentieth Century Fox signed DalÍ up to work on a nightmare sequence for a film called Moontide, starring Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino and directed by Fritz Lang. DalÍ contributed a selection of deeply disquieting paintings and drawings, but the whole project was doomed because a fortnight after filming began, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

By 1944, however, DalÍ was signing up with another Hollywood director, this time Alfred Hitchcock. “My movie agent and excellent friend Fefe [Felix Ferry] ordered a nightmare from me by telephone,” he wrote in his shamelessly self-promotional publication, DalÍ News. It was for the film Spellbound. DalÍ had appeared in Life magazine six times over the previous 12 months, and his name was considered to be a bankable asset. But Hitchcock wanted him for the vividness of his depictions of dreams.

“All DalÍ’s work is very solid and very sharp, with very long perspectives and black shadows . . . All dreams in the movies are blurred,” he said. “It isn’t true. DalÍ was the best man for me to do the dreams because that is what dreams should be.”

For one scene for Spellbound, DalÍ had designed a set involving hanging grand pianos from the ceiling, with a trick perspective to show dancers in silhouette beneath. When he arrived on set he found that the studio had built miniature pianos and hired 40 dwarf performers. He was furious and the scene was scrapped.

In the finished film, DalÍ’s dream sequence, seen in the form of painted backdrops, created a highly disturbing atmosphere and his work was generally well received by the critics.

DalÍ came into contact with Walt Disney during the filming of Spellbound in 1945.

They met at a dinner party at the home of Jack Warner. During the 1940s DalÍ’s work as a painter had been relegated to second place behind his role in Hollywood as a writer, scenographer, clothes designer, creator of advertising campaigns and collaborator on cinematographic sequences.

On January 14, 1946, DalÍ signed a contract with Disney Studios to work on a six-minute episode combining real images with animated drawings for the film Destino. For several months he went in to work every morning to the animation studio on Dopey Avenue in Burbank, just like any other studio employee. DalÍ produced the principal images for the film, about 15 paintings and 135 sketches as well as images on lined paper to be used as a visual guide to the unfolding action of the film. As Felix Fanes points out in his catalogue essay: “It can therefore be said that DalÍ was responsible to a large extent for the visual aspect of the film.”

Destino was never fully realised at the time because of financial problems, but years later, Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, working with the original animators, produced a fully realised version in 2003. “I believe they [Walt Disney and DalÍ] influenced one another,” says Roy Disney. “Disney films can be seen as being incredibly surreal, and I imagine that is why DalÍ was attracted to them. But also I think they worked well together because, above all, they were both incredible optimists.”

The experience with Destino was typical of DalÍ’s track record in Hollywood. Very few of the film projects he worked on were ever realised. But DalÍ never gave up the struggle to work in film. Having enthusiastically embraced the medium in the late 1920s, he explored animation, proposed documentaries, sketched scenarios and generally ran around Hollywood wanting to get involved.

As Professor Dawn Ades, the director of the Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies, points out, film was a medium in which he could draw both on his visual and his verbal skills in the service of his imagination. He could indulge his fantasies.

In the end, the story of his work in film is one of disappointment overridden by boundless optimism. In telling the story of his love affair with the medium, this exhibition and its catalogue shine a light on an area of DalÍ’s life that has to date been little known.

DalÍ & Film is at Tate Modern (020-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk) from June 1 to Sept 9, in collaboration with Fundació Gala-Salvador DalÍ, with support from the Spanish Tourist Office.

DalÍ & Film, edited by Matthew Gale, is published by Tate Publishing

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette