"The two most energetic motors that make the artistic and superfine brain of Salvador Dali function are, first, libido , or sexual instinct, and, second, the anguish of death," affirms the painter; "not a single minute of my life passes without the sublime Catholic, apostolic, and Roman specter of death accompanying me even in the least important of my most subtle and capricious fantasies."
This painting was done in California at the end of the year 1940; the horrible face of war, its eyes filled with infinite death, was much more a reminiscence of the Spanish Civil War than of the Second World War, which, at the time, had not yet provided a cortege of frightful images capable of impressing Dali. He himself wrote in
The Secret Life:
"I was entering a period of rigor and asceticism which was going to dominate my style, my thoughts, and my tormented life. Spain on fire would light up this drama of the renaissance of aesthetics. Spain would serve as a holocaust to that post-war Europe tortured by ideological dramas, by moral and artistic anxieties…. At one feel swoop, from the middle of the Spanish cadaver, springs up. Half-devoured by vermin and ideological worms, the Iberian penis in erection, huge like a cathedral filled with the white dynamite of hatred. Bury and Unbury ! Disinter and Inter ! In order to unbury again ! Such was the charnel desire of the Civil War in that impatient Spain. One would see how she was capable of suffering; of making others suffer, of burying and unburying, of killing and resurrecting. In was necessary to scratch the earth to exhume tradition and to profane everything in order to be dazzled anew by all the treasures that the land was hiding in its entrails." The horror of this picture is further increased by the brown tonalities which dominate its atmosphere. On the anecdotal side, Dali has stressed that it was the only work where one could see the true imprint of his hand on the canvas (at the lower right).
