Another name for the painting Soft construction with boiled beans". The picture was painted in 1936. Canvas, oil. Dimensions: 100 × 99 cm. Currently in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The picture is made in a surrealistic manner characteristic of Salvador Dali. If you look at the picture, you get the feeling that the picture presents an absolutely meaningless plot, but everything falls into place if you find out about the artist's intention. Like many other paintings by the surrealists, this work is filled with symbols and allegories, in order to decipher which you need to know the history of the creation of the canvas.

The painting was painted by Salvador Dali in 1936, just when the Spanish Civil War began. Then the Spanish opposition, led by General Francisco Franco, who was supported by the fascist regime of Germany, Italy and Portugal, staged a rebellion, as a result of which the Spanish government was overthrown and the Civil War began. These events became fundamental for the painting of the Spanish artist Salvador Dali.

In his work, he expressed his experiences and his ideas about the civil war. In the center of the composition is a strange interweaving of arms and legs. If you look closely, you can see that the overall shape of the surrealistic structure resembles the outline of Spain. The parts of the body in the picture seem to be linked in a terrible fight, which symbolizes the struggle of the two sides. At the same time, the picture shows two legs and two arms, which suggests that the mortal struggle of the two sides is actually one whole, that is, one person who tore himself apart - Spain, which was divided into two camps, after which fratricidal war. At the very top of the composition, we can see a head with a face that is distorted by pain. At the very bottom of the hand, which has already turned black and died. Scattered on the ground are boiled beans, which are considered food for the poor.

The picture may seem creepy and frightening, but that's how Salvador Dali decided to depict all the horrors of war. It is also worth noting that this work, in its design and frightening realism, is compared with the famous painting by Pablo Picasso "", which was written in 1937 and also refers to the Spanish Civil War.

Premonition of Civil War (Soft construction with boiled beans) Salvador Dali

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Premonition of Civil War (Salvador Dali)

The famous canvas “Soft composition with boiled beans: a premonition of civil war” was painted by the artist in 1936 - during his program surrealist art. When the civil war began in Spain, S. Dali took the side of the Falangists, saw in General Franco a politician who could do much more for the country than any new government. “But the countless comments of Salvador Dali about everything and nothing,” as A. Rozhin writes, “should not always be taken literally. Therefore, his contradictory nature, according to Schnide, is especially obvious when he glorifies dictatorial power with one hand, and at the same time creates one of his most impressive and intimidating works - “Soft construction with boiled beans: a premonition of civil war” with the other.

Indeed, two huge creatures, resembling deformed, accidentally fused parts of the human body, frighten with the possible consequences of their mutations. One creature is formed from a face distorted by pain, a human chest and a leg; the other - from two hands, distorted as if by nature itself, and likened to the hip part of the form. They are locked together in a terrible battle, desperately fighting with each other, these mutant creatures are disgusting as a body that has torn itself apart.

These creatures are depicted against the backdrop of a landscape painted by S. Dali in a brilliant realistic manner. Along the horizon, against the background of a low mountain range, there are miniature images of some old-looking towns.

The low horizon line exaggerates the action of fantastic creatures in the foreground, at the same time it emphasizes the immensity of the sky, obscured by huge clouds. And the clouds themselves, with their disturbing movement, further intensify the tragic intensity of inhuman passions.

The painting “Premonition of the Civil War” is small, but it has a genuine monumental expressiveness, which is born from emotional contrast, from a large-scale opposition of boundlessly living nature and crushing heaviness of unreal mutant figures. This work opens the anti-war theme in the work of S. Dali, it sounds frightening, warns the mind and appeals to it. The square figure formed by the limbs is reminiscent of the geographic outline of Spain. The artist himself said: “Bad forebodings of the impending civil war tormented me,” Dali recalled, “and six months before the events began, I painted this picture. Seasoned with boiled beans, it depicts a huge human body in the form of monstrous growths of arms and legs that break each other in a paroxysm of madness. ... These are not just monsters - the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War, but war as such just do.

In the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Republicans were defeated, and General Franco, who came to power, established a fascist dictatorship in the country. Most of the Surrealists (this applies, by the way, to the European cultural elite in general) sympathized with the Republicans. Dali, unlike them, remained a supporter of Franco, although he did not particularly advertise this. In his political predilections, he was often unpredictable. But regardless of all this, he managed to create a powerful and unusual anti-war canvas. “Bad forebodings of the impending civil war tormented me,” Dali recalled, “and six months before the start of the events, I painted this picture. Seasoned with boiled beans, it ~ depicts a huge human body in the form of monstrous growths of arms and legs that break each other in a paroxysm of madness ". The square figure formed by the limbs resembles the geographical outlines of Spain - here we are dealing with an obvious allusion.

In 1936, Spain was covered with horror. This has never happened before on Earth. There were Genghis Khan and Timur, Attila and the Holy Inquisition. But all this pales in comparison with what was gathering in Europe in the 30s of the last century, and fell upon Spain on July 18, 1936, following the phrase: "A cloudless sky over all of Spain." The full title of Salvador Dali's painting is "Soft construction with boiled beans" (premonition of civil war). Fragments of human bones are assembled into a strange frame, vaguely reminiscent of Spain in shape. This terrible structure is crowned with a head, with a crazy grin, turned to the indifferent sky. And boiled beans on scorched earth. A year later, when the war turned from premonition into reality, Pablo Picasso wrote his Guernica, in which what Dali had given as a premise, as a state of mind, was embodied in a very specific nightmare of the consequences of the war.

The fact that the atmosphere of fascism is thickening in modern Russia is not seen only by the blind. A premonition of war (and for many, anticipation) has become a commonplace in the press and on TV. Kiselev constantly incinerates the USA; Solovyov happily announces that the bear is not obliged to tell anyone where the borders of his taiga lie. The “leaders of Novorossiya” Dolgov, Rogov and Kofman have become permanent residents of the studios of Russian TV channels, and they tell with a smile how they will come to Kyiv and hang Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk. There is no reaction of Russian culture to this. I'm not talking about protests and citizenship. I'm talking about the reaction in the language of culture. In Russia today there is neither Salvador Dali nor Pablo Picasso. In the place where there used to be great Russian culture (primarily great Russian literature), today there is a yawning wasteland. Wasteland has names, surnames, patronymics. No, you say, artists? How is it not? Here you are, Ilya Sergeevich Glazunov, who has just come to visit a cordial friend Jean Marie Le Pen. Well, the one that called the gas chambers “only an episode of the Second World War”, and promised to send his critics of Jewish origin to the ovens. So, Ilya Glazunov promised Le Pen to include his portrait in his next epic canvas. And you say - Dali, Picasso, some premonitions. This is not a premonition, but an anticipation!

Among the authors of such popular publications as Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda, many fear that the anticipation of war, its premonition may turn out to be false, and the thirst for war will be unquenched. Uliana Skoybeda, in Komsomolskaya Pravda on November 1, is sad: “The explosion of patriotism in the wake of Crimea was great, but it passes, it passed. We need a new replenishment, but we have not conquered Novorossia (militias do not count) and we have not defeated Kyiv ... I would like clear actions, a plan for how the government will bring the country out of the current situation. Carry out land reform? To drive all the unemployed into the field? Rebuild businesses? All for the front, all for victory? But after all, there is no front, and here is the cognitive dissonance ... "So that one of the readers does not decide that the KP journalist is just sharing her opinion, Skoybeda explains the status of her texts as follows:" I hear the rustle of events. I know where the tree will fall. Therefore, my speakers cause a resonance phenomenon. I feel the mood of society." Why do we need Akhmatova? We have Skoybeda.

The feeling of extreme awkwardness from this product arises not only from its lack of talent and vulgarity. Not only because instead of Bunin's chaste description of passion, Mikhalkov gives a bed scene, accompanied for clarity by the work of the pistons of a steamship engine. This is in case one of the viewers does not understand what is happening there between the naked and sweaty hero and heroine of the film. The main awkwardness comes from the extremely edifying nature of the film, its instructive nature in the spirit of Soviet agitation. The hero asks one question for three hours: “How did this happen?”, referring to the nightmare of revolution and civil war. Mikhalkov does not rely on the mind of the viewer and openly answers this question: the whole trouble is in the enlightenment of the people, in science, as well as in freedom of speech and thought, thanks to which criticism of the authorities becomes possible. Here is a symbolic example for you: a teacher told a boy about evolution as a child. The boy was surprised: how does it mean that both the king and the queen descended from a monkey?! After all, this is what happens? .. And in the next scene, this boy, having become an adult, is already shown as an employee of the Cheka, organizing a sadistic and vile flooding of a barge with Wrangel officers locked in the hold. Darwin - as the immediate cause of sadism and meanness.

The twentieth century was the century of ideologies. Different: religious and secular, left and right, totalitarian and democratic, inhuman and humane. But all of them, with varying degrees of success, served as a social glue. They carried out the assembly of society, contributed to the growth of the individual into society. That is, they did what communities, guilds, estates did in past centuries. In today's Russia, despite the thirst for state ideology, it does not exist and cannot exist. Mikhalkov, like Putin, like Kiselyov, Gundyaev (Patriarch Kirill), Solovyov and other ironworkers and spring workers cannot have ideology, not because it cannot be invented, but because ideology arises as a kind of unity and hierarchy of values. And all of the above companies have the same value: the preservation of power and the multiplication of property. Therefore, all of them are equally sad about the empire and about the Soviet government, they can easily change the places of the Reds and Whites, Chekists and White Guards. The state of Russian public consciousness today is exactly like what is depicted in a Dali painting: here are human bones, here are boiled beans, and here is an empty earth.

Words and values ​​don't matter. And, in the end, they don't make sense at all. At the end of last week, on October 31, I took part in the program "Opinions of the Parties" on Radio Moscow. This is one of the few programs in which I can still participate, since its host, Igor Igorev, leads the discussion like a professional journalist, and not like, for example, Solovyov or Tolstoy. My opponent was political scientist Pavel Svyatenkov. The speech, naturally, has gone about Ukraine. To my thesis that Russia became the first and only state that, after the Second World War, annexed, that is, stole a piece of the territory of another state, I expected objections in the traditional spirit about Serbia, about justice, the will. But got the unexpected. Political scientist Svyatenkov, who has two (2!) higher educations, Moscow State University and MGIMO, explained to me and radio listeners that the first act of annexation after World War II was committed by Ukraine, which in 1954 stole Crimea from Russia. When asked if the political scientist understood that the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR were not independent states, and the borders between them were the same convention as the borders between the Tula and Moscow regions, the political scientist said that he knew for sure that then in the USSR they were different countries , and Ukraine stole Crimea from Russia. I then remembered the hero of Shukshin's story, Gleb Kapustin, a discussion with whom not a single urban intellectual could stand.

Text: Igor Repkin

Admiration for the policies of Franco and Hitler. Verbal apologetics of fascism. "Soft design with boiled beans (premonition of civil war)", 1936. Visual demonstration of pacifism. Where is the real Dali - not an enthusiastic creator, but a true personality? Jean Ingres said: “Drawing is the honesty of art.” Let's check.

DUEL WITH THE DOUBLE

Salvador Domenech Felip Jacinth Dali and Domenech. His full name. Long, confusing, complicated. Salvador Dali. His creative pseudonym. Bright, bold, memorable. Photographic accuracy of the image, coupled with inept, childlike strokes. A sign of an academic, but modest pictorial gift. Realistic landscapes filled with unreal creatures. A clear confirmation that genius and madness always go together, and Dali is undeniably a genius and, perhaps, crazy. Figueres. A small market town in the Ampurdana Valley in northern Catalonia. Salvador Dali was born here 110 years ago, on May 11, 1904. As a child, he was welcome. True, not by itself. Nine months, nine days and 16 hours before the birth of the surrealist genius, a tragedy occurred in the family of the respected notary Salvador Dali y Cusi and his wife Felipa Domenech - their firstborn Salvador Gal Anselm died at 22 months. The inconsolable parents named the next child with the same name - in honor of the Savior.

And his whole life will be marked by the presence of a double. Invisible, but Dali is an artist more than tangible.

“All the eccentric things that I tend to do, all these absurd antics, are the tragic constant of my life. I want to prove to myself that I am not a dead brother, I am alive. As in the myth of Castor and Pollux: only by killing my brother, I gain immortality.

This confession in Salvador Dali's Unspoken Revelations, published in 1976, is the product of another visit to the cemetery, after which the five-year-old Salvador formed his own opinion about parental love, deciding that it was not intended for him, but for his dead brother.

However, Dali himself, having told about the eternal duel with his namesake brother (if this is not just the fruit of a living imagination), provides eloquent evidence that all the luxury of parental gifts and permissiveness of behavior went to him.

“In my parental home, I established an absolute monarchy. Everyone was ready to serve me. My parents idolized me. Once, on the feast of the Adoration of the Magi, in a pile of gifts, I found royal vestments: a shining gold crown with large topazes and an ermine mantle.

As a result, the child grew up arrogant and uncontrollable. He achieved his whims and simulation, always sought to stand out and attract attention. Once started a scandal on the market square. The bakery was closed. It meant nothing to El Salvador. He needed sweetness. Here and now. A crowd has gathered. The police settled the matter - they persuaded the merchant to open a shop during a siesta and give the boy a sweet.

Plus a bunch of phobias and complexes. Fear of grasshoppers, for example. The insect behind the scruff of the neck drove the boy to a frenzy of hysteria. Classmates such a reaction is very amused ...

“I am 37 years old, and the fear that this creature inspires me has not decreased. Moreover, it seems to me that it is growing, although there is nowhere further. If I stand on the edge of the abyss and a grasshopper jumps on me, I will rush down, if only not to prolong this torture!

What is the reason for this phobia: latent sadomasochism or symbolism of fear of sexual relations with a woman, as biographers often explain, is not important. The period of childhood and adolescence determines the rest of life. This is especially true for Dali. In many experiences, actions, impressions and stresses of childhood and adolescence, egocentrism and a thirst for wealth are rooted, a desire to stand out, albeit through shocking behavior, the plots of paintings that are obscure without knowing the context. Here are the origins of duality: Dali the man and Dali the artist. Here is hidden the start to surrealism.

FROM LOHANI TO BUNUEL

A small impressionistic landscape with oil paints on a wooden board. Salvador Dali painted his first painting at the age of 10. And soon he spent whole days sitting in the former laundry room in the attic. His first workshop. Where the atmosphere was shocking, and, often, the behavior of the owner.

“It was so cramped that the cement tub occupied it almost entirely.<…>Inside the cement tub, I placed a chair, on which, instead of a desktop, I laid a board horizontally. When it was very hot, I undressed and turned on the tap, filling the tub up to the waist. The water came from a reservoir next door and was always warm from the sun.”

At the age of 14 he had his first solo exhibition at the Municipal Theater of Figueres. Dali's ability to draw is undeniable. He stubbornly seeks his own style, mastering all the styles he liked: impressionism, cubism, pointillism ... The result is quite understandable - in 1922, Dali was a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.

At first, in the capital, Dali led the life of a hermit, and spent his free time in his room, experimenting with different styles of painting and polishing the academic style of writing. But here he became close to Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buñuel. The former would soon become one of the most popular playwrights in Spain. The second would later be one of the most respected avant-garde filmmakers in Europe.

Both Lorca and Buñuel are part of the new intellectual life in Spain. They challenged the conservative and dogmatic doctrines of the political elite and the Catholic Church, which formed the basis of Spanish society at the time. Step by step, Dali, confident in the omnipotence of Reason, plunged into the “poetic Universe” of Lorca, who proclaimed the presence in the world of a Mystery beyond definition.

In his youth, Dali tirelessly copied Velasquez, Vermeer of Delft, Leonardo da Vinci, studied antique samples, studied drawing with Raphael and Ingres, idolized Dürer. In the works of the early period (1914-1927) one can see the influence of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Cezanne.

“Only in the past do I see geniuses like Raphael - they seem to me gods ... I know that what I did next to them is the collapse of pure water.” In the 60s of the last century, he will also say that he has always been and remains a supporter of the academic perfection of technology and the traditional style of writing. “... I eagerly asked them about painting techniques, about how much paint and how much oil to take, I needed to know how the thinnest layer of paint is made ...” - from the memoirs of the Academy of San Fernando.

In 1928 at the International Carnegie Exhibition in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) "Basket of Bread" (1925) was presented. The painting is almost photorealistic.

Then qualities begin to appear that reflect not so much the real world as its inner, personal one.

In the painting "Female Figure at the Window" (1925), Dali depicted his sister Anna-Maria, looking out of the window at the bay in Cadaqués. The canvas is saturated with the spirit of the unreality of sleep, although it is written in a meticulous realistic style. It has an aura of emptiness and at the same time something invisible that lurks behind the space of the picture. In addition, a feeling of silence is created. If this were the work of the Impressionists, the viewer would feel its atmosphere: he would hear the sea or the whisper of a breeze, but here it seems that all life has stopped. The figure of Anna-Maria is isolated, she is in another world, devoid of the sensuality of the female images of Renoir or Degas.

In 1929, Buñuel invited Dali to work on the film Andalusian Dog. Among the most shocking shots is cutting a man's eye with a blade. The scene is considered one of the most brutal in the history of world cinema.

Invented by Dali. Decaying donkeys in other scenes are also his creativity. Today, the film, which uses images caught from the human subconscious, is a classic of surrealism, the king of which Dali was to become.

And again a paradox. He is an exemplary and diligent student. Overrespectful to his predecessors in art. “When people ask me: “What's new? - I answer: “Velasquez! And now, and always."

At the same time, he rebels against everyone and everything. Bifurcation of the psyche, bifurcation of life purpose - for the sake of striving to stand out at all costs.

A MIX OF DELIANS AND REALITY

“But then something happened that was destined to happen,” Dali appeared. A surrealist to the marrow of his bones, driven by the Nietzschean "will to power", he proclaimed unlimited freedom from any aesthetic or moral coercion and declared that one can go to the end, to the most extreme, extreme limits in any creative experiment, without caring about any succession or succession.

This is how Dali writes about himself in The Diary of a Genius.

Indeed, his paintings and his confessions did not bypass either the sexual revolution and the civil war, or the atomic bomb and Nazism with fascism, or the Catholic faith and science, or classical art, or even cooking. And literally with all the ideas, principles, concepts, values, phenomena, people with whom he dealt, Dali interacts like dynamite, destroying everything in its path, shattering any truth, any principle, if this principle is based on the foundations of reason, order, faith , virtue, logic, harmony, ideal beauty.

Always in one way or another, bold, scandalous, biting, provocative, paradoxical, unpredictable or irreverent.

For him, there is only surrealistic creativity, which turns into something new everything that it touches. But! Most surrealists explored the subconscious by freeing their minds from conscious control and allowing thoughts to float to the surface like soap bubbles without any conscious sequence. This was called "automatism", and in writing it was reflected in the creation of abstract forms, which were images from the subconscious.

Dali, in his words, chose the "paranoid-critical method." He painted images familiar to the mind: people, animals, buildings, landscapes, but allowed them to connect under the dictation of consciousness. He often merged them in a grotesque manner so that, for example, the limbs turned into fish, and the bodies of women into horses.

On one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century - "The Persistence of Memory" (1931) - soft, like melted watch dials hang from a bare olive branch, from an incomprehensible origin of a cubic slab, from a certain creature that looks like both a face and a snail without shells. Each detail can be considered independently.

Together they create a magically mysterious picture. At the same time, both here and in “Partial obscuration. Six appearances of Lenin on the piano" (1931), and in "Soft design with boiled beans (premonition of civil war)" (1936), and in "Dream inspired by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, a moment before awakening" (1944 d.) a clear and absolute thoughtfulness of the compositional and coloristic system is read. The combination of reality and delusional fantasy was designed, not born by chance.

FASCIST OR PACIFIST

Dali's main personal attitude - to intensify the flow of irrational surrealistic images - is sharply and decisively manifested in the political sphere. So much so that it served as one of the reasons for the scandalous break with the group of the writer and art theorist Andre Breton, the author of the First Manifesto of Surrealism.

In the 30s of the last century, Salvador Dali repeatedly depicted Vladimir Lenin in his paintings and, at least once, captured Adolf Hitler. The image of the leader of the proletariat remained unsolved. Dali left the audience to talk about his personality. But the interest in the person of the Fuhrer commented boldly and defiantly:

“I was completely fascinated by Hitler’s soft, plump back, which was so well fitted by the unchanging tight uniform. Whenever I started to draw a leather belt that came from the belt and, like a shoulder strap, hugged the opposite shoulder, the soft suppleness of the Nazi flesh that stood out under the military tunic led me to real ecstasy, causing the taste sensations of something milky, nutritious, Wagnerian and forcing my heart is beating wildly from a rare excitement, which I do not experience even in moments of love intimacy.

The plump body of Hitler, which seemed to me the most divine female flesh, covered with impeccably snow-white skin, had some kind of hypnotic effect on me.

Surrealist friends, however, could not imagine that the preoccupation with the image of Hitler had nothing to do with politics, and that the shockingly ambiguous portrait of the feminized Fuhrer was imbued with the same black humor as the image of Wilhelm Tell with the face of Lenin ("The Riddle of Wilhelm Tell", 1933 .).

Dali was recorded as an apologist for fascism. Fortunately, a rumor spread that Hitler would have liked certain plots of Salvador's paintings, where there are swans, loneliness and megalomania blows, the spirit of Richard Wagner and Hieronymus Bosch is felt. Breton would later relate that in February 1939, Dali publicly declared that all the misfortunes of the modern world have racial roots and that the first decision to be made is to enslave all peoples of color through the joint efforts of all peoples of the white race. Andre claimed that there was not a grain of humor in this call ...

“My fanaticism, which was further intensified after Hitler forced Freud and Einstein to flee the Reich, proves that this man occupies me solely as a point of application for my own mania, and also because he amazes me with his unparalleled catastrophicity.” Dali replied.

He explained that he could not be a Nazi, if only because if Hitler conquered Europe, he would kill all hysterics like Dali, as they did in Germany, where they are treated as degenerates. In addition, the femininity and irresistible depravity with which Dali associates the image of Hitler will serve as ample reason for the Nazis to accuse the artist of blasphemy.

In 1937, Dali wrote "Hitler's Riddle". The Fuhrer appears as a tattered and grimy photograph lying on a huge platter under the shadow of a gigantic and monstrous telephone receiver resembling a disgusting insect. There was, the artist said, and a simpler visual manifestation of anti-fascism: they asked for an autograph for Hitler, and El Salvador put a straight cross - the exact opposite of a broken swastika.

“Hitler embodied for me the perfect image of a great masochist who unleashed a world war solely for the pleasure of losing it and being buried under the rubble of an empire.”

It is impossible to call his position pro-fascist. A masochistic hero who unleashed a world war for the pleasure of losing it is not the banner under which political forces can be united.

Usually this declaration is not believed: how could he talk about his apoliticality, touching so defiantly on the sharpest aspects of the political life of the 20th century ...

NOT FOR POLITICS

But why not admit, based on his biography and personality traits, that his outrageousness was a fig leaf for a vulnerable person embarrassed by his own originality, who defended it with an attack on generally accepted norms. After all, it turned out, when one of the surrealists suddenly declared himself a communist, that Dali was an ardent Spanish royalist. When other artists claimed that the only way to success was through poverty and bohemian simplicity, he made no secret of the fact that he strived for success for the sake of money and convenience. When contemporaries believed that truth in art could only be achieved through an avant-garde experiment, Dali declared that he himself was very old-fashioned.

Six months before the start of the Spanish Civil War, he completed A Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (An Anticipation of the Civil War) (1936). Two huge creatures, resembling deformed, accidentally fused parts of the human body, frighten with the possible consequences of their mutations. One creature is formed from a face distorted by pain, a human chest and a leg; the other - from two hands, distorted as if by nature itself, and likened to the hip part of the form. They are locked together in a terrible battle, desperately fighting with each other, these mutant creatures are disgusting as a body that has torn itself apart. The square figure formed by the limbs is reminiscent of the geographic outline of Spain.

The low horizon line exaggerates the action of creatures in the foreground, emphasizes the immensity of the sky, obscured by huge clouds. And the clouds themselves, with their disturbing movement, further intensify the tragic intensity of inhuman passions. In addition, Dali managed to find a strong image expressing the horrors of war, symbolized by simple boiled beans, the food of the poor.

"The Face of War" (1940). Dali and his wife arrived in the United States from France, whose troops had surrendered to the German invasion. There is no blood in the picture, no fire, no dead. Just an ugly head with long hissing snakes instead of hair, like a Gorgon Medusa. But how accurately the thought is conveyed, what fear and horror seizes the viewer! The mouth and arched eyebrows give the head a pained look. Instead of eyes and in the mouth, there are skulls, inside of which other skulls are located in the same way. It seems that the head is stuffed with endless death.

THE MYSTERY REMAINS

“There is almost always something of God in any mistake. So don't be in a hurry to fix it. On the contrary, try to comprehend it with your mind, to get to the bottom of the essence. And you will discover its hidden meaning.

One journalist asked if Salvador Dali was just crazy or an ordinary successful businessman. The artist replied that he himself did not know where the deep, philosophizing Dali begins and where the crazy and absurd Dali ends.

But in this two-facedness of Salvador Dali lies the value of his double phenomenon. Dali the man and Dali the artist.