Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)--Ethan Jackson
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), a painting by Salvador Dalí a Spanish painter known for his surrealist artwork. Dalí painted this piece with oil on a canvas in 1936, just six months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, although there are studies that Dalí worked on that go all the way back to 1934. Dalí claims that he had a prophetic vision showing him the on coming war, hence how he was able to paint it before it started, but this claim has been refuted since there is speculation that Dalí changed the name of the painting after the fact. The Spanish Civil War which began in 1936 affected Dalí very acutely. While he and his wife were able to escape Spain, fleeing to Paris, Dalí’s sister, Ana Maria, was put in prison and tortured by the Republicans who supported communism, while his friend from art school, Federico García Lorca, was sentenced to be, and later, executed by a firing squad. When Dalí and his wife, Gala Dalí, were able to return back to their home in Spain, they came back to their house that had been destroyed in the fighting.
I was exposed to this painting twice before selecting it to use for this project. My mom was the first to show me this painting sometime in my childhood. My mom is a very avid painter and loves art history, which often meant that growing up she would show me a few paintings every week and then quiz me on them to make sure I remembered them. This is one of the paintings that she showed me when she was teaching me about surrealism and the paintings of Salvador Dalí. The second time that I encountered this painting was also with my mom on a trip we took to Philadelphia a few summers ago. The main reason we visited Philadelphia was to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other museums. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), was, and currently still is, on display there, and was one of the many artworks I saw while there. I chose this painting because I already knew its backstory of the Spanish Civil War and we talked about that in class when going over Goya’s etchings, which brought this to mind. I also like how it interacts with the question that Goya presented through his etchings about the grotesque suffering of soldiers and civilians alike.
This painting at first was hard for me to comprehend, but after studying it closer it becomes clear that Dalí is utilizing his surrealist style to show the grotesque and violent nature of war. The first thing that a viewer is drawn to in the painting is the creature at the middle of the painting. This creature is human-like, but is clearly not human. The body is distorted with the torso on the bottom, and two arms jutting out, one reaching up at what is left of an amputated leg, and the other reaching on the ground towards the foot that was amputated. This unnatural position that the creature is in can be seen as the creature tearing itself apart, much like Spain did during the Civil War. The creature also exhibits being in grotesque pain as it is in an unnatural position, and the head atop the creature looks to be grimacing. The head also looks as if it has been severed from the body, a callback to Goya, and an illustration of needless violence. The violence depicted in the painting, and there is plenty of it, grows to the point where you must question “Why?”. This is the point that I believe that Dalí is getting at with this painting, a questioning of why this level of violence is necessary in war. This violence not only exceeds the amount that is needed by war, but also is a violence that is perpetrated onto civilians and soldiers alike, much akin to what is happening now in Lebanon and Gaza, where civilians are being targeted indiscriminately along with the militant fighters. This painting asks why, to which Dalí answers with the creature, which represents humanity, tearing itself apart.