Dali and The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War

With its flair for detail as gruesome as it is meticulous, Salvador Dalí's Surrealist painting style might well have been invented to depict the unique horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Dalí turned his attention to the social and political tragedy that had beset his homeland in paintings such as Autumn Cannibalism and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), in which he updated his earlier obsessions with cannibalistic mutilation and putrefaction to conjure up his own nightmarish vision of Spain on the brink of self-inflicted annihilation. Like Picasso's Guernica, painted one year later, these works address the Spanish Civil War that began on July 17, 1936 when General Francisco Franco led a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic. Over the decades, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans and Guernica have come to serve as universal icons decrying human hatred and destruction. However, there are fundamental differences between the two artists response to the war. Picasso, who had publicly sided with the Republican forces in their attempt to resist the Nationalist's armed insurrection, sought to convey the horrific carnage inflicted upon the Basque town of Guernica, which had been bombarded by German warplanes in support of Franco. Dalí's message, on the other hand, is far more ambiguous and a-political, reflecting his belief that the Spanish Civil War was an inevitable occurrence involving instinctual forces, a "phenomenon of natural history," rather than a political event in which one had to take sides. Taking his cue from the work of his compatriot Francisco de Goya, Dalí instead adopted the clinical detachment of a scientist or neutral observer who does not flinch from representing the rotting stench of a decomposing body, its face racked in pain, as a metaphor for his country's inexorable slide into internecine combat. The artist believed that his savage image of Spain ripping itself to pieces prophetically foretold the reciprocal killings and atrocities committed by both sides in this bloody conflict, as he later explained, "the Spanish corpse was soon to let the world know what its guts smelled like."