Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War
This painting is an allegorical response to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, but it is also a garish and gruesome depiction of a body destroying itself. Dali painted this work prior to General Franco's invasion, yet it predicts the violence, anxiety, and doom many Spaniards felt during Franco's later rule. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans is a fine example of a Dali composition that simultaneously expresses his sexual obsessions as well as his political outrage.
Marc Chagall
1953
