The Face of War
Salvador Dalí, 1940
Image not available: work still under copyright
Painted in 1940, during a brief period when Dalí lived in California, this work dates from the years between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the start of the Second World War. War was a recurring subject in his work, and the artist sometimes believed that his visions anticipated future conflicts. Here a withered, disembodied head hangs above a barren desert landscape, and its expression conveys fear and misery. Inside its mouth and eye sockets sit identical faces, and within those faces more of the same appear, in a sequence the composition suggests could go on indefinitely. Biting serpents swarm around the large face, while in the lower right corner a handprint can be seen, which Dalí insisted was made by his own hand. The arrangement is simple, yet the repetition of faces creates a sense of vertigo that makes the image unsettling. The painting belongs to surrealism, a movement in which dreamlike and obsessive imagery expresses the anxiety of its time. It is now held by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where visitors can see up close one of the darkest images from Dalí's output during the war years.
- Painter
- Salvador Dalí
- Date
- 1940
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 64 × 79 cm
- Museum
- Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
- Movement
- surrealism