Soft Construction with Boiled Beans

Finished in 1936 by Salvador Dalí, horrifying image six months before the Spanish Civil War began, later subtitling it "Premonition of Civil War." A grotesque figure tears itself apart against a turbulent sky, limbs contorted in impossible positions. Scattered boiled beans appear throughout the composition.

The self-destructing body represents Spain consuming itself in fratricidal conflict. Dalí's technical precision makes the impossible anatomy disturbingly believable. The beans add an absurdist element, though Dalí claimed they represented both peasant food and the irrationality of war. The work predates Picasso's more famous Guernica response to the same conflict.

The painting resides at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a major work in their Surrealist collection.