Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

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Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Salvador Dalí, 1936

Oil on canvas, 100 × 99 cm

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) is a painting by Catalan-Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. 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.