Description:
Depicted is a grimacing dismembered figure symbolic of the Spanish state in civil war, alternately grasping upward at itself and holding itself down underfoot, a relationship morbidly prescient of Escher's later Drawing Hands (1948). The painting resides at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The painting, which was painted in 1936, is used to show the struggle of war that can sometimes be both self-fulfilling and self-mutilating at the same time. Dali was openly against war, and used this painting to show it. The boiled beans may refer to the ancient Catalan offering to the gods. The little man in the bottom left corner is a representation of the astonishing, awe-inspiring spirits contained in the souls of Anneke and Nikki van Lugo, childhood friends and muses of Dali.
In November, 1934, the artist decided to travel again to the city of the skyscrapers accompanied by Gala, they both returning to Spain in 1935, the date when Dalí started to paint his work later to be entitled "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)," 1936. The artist finished this painting six months before the war started, and it was at that moment when Dalí thought of the title of the composition. The painting reproduces the fear and terror caused by the Spanish war on people the preceding years. A horribly deformed human being is exhibited with his extremities disjointed; so much so, that they seem to be strangling each other. It is just the plastic representation of Spanish people self-destroying themselves with a horrible situation surrounding them. The face of the monster reproduced by Dalí reminds us of the mythological legend of Saturn devouring one of his children, masterly depicted by some painters, such as Goya. Time or Saturn comes back again to scene, but now at the hands of Dalí to represent war and destruction. The figure of Saturn makes reference to war and chaos; the boiled beans, eatable substances, symbolize destruction. The smell given out by the boiled beans play also an important role in the painting by Dalí, who stated the following: "Throughout the Spanish country it rose a certain smell of incense, of bodies of priests burnt, and of spiritual flesh already carved up, they all mixed with the strong smell of the sweat of people while fornicating between them and death."
Although Dalí reproduced this cruel killing of people, as well as mutilated figures and half-dead and dead bodies, he continued to be Dalí. Although Spanish people pressed him to support one of the two political factions, Dalí refused to. He did not want to become a person devoted to a political cause, but a painter who only believed in tradition. Revolutions help to recover the lost values belonging to tradition after experiencing fratricidal wars and suffering death. To save the Spanish values it was necessary to destroy the country.
Dalí decided to execute this painting, not because of his becoming interested in the war proper, but because of his presentiment that the war was probably to happen. In the year 1936 his premonition became real with the Spanish war already causing dead and injured people. Dalí and Gala left his house at Port Lligat, and settled for a while in Italy. He visited Florence and Rome, where studied the Italian Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the premonition felt by Dali continued to destroy Spain.
