Soft Construction with Boiled Beans

Painted just months before the Spanish Civil War broke out, this haunting work by Salvador Dalí is officially titled "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)." Dalí claimed he sensed the coming conflict in his homeland and put that dread onto the canvas. The result is a monstrous figure that seems to tear itself apart, one hand crushing a breast, a face twisted in agony against a wide and empty Spanish plain. It is a body at war with itself, which is exactly how Dalí saw a nation fighting its own people.

As one of Surrealism's most famous voices, Dalí loved to pull strange images straight from dreams and nightmares, and this is one of his darkest. The little boiled beans scattered near the bottom add a bizarre touch, almost absurd against such a brutal scene. Some say Dalí used them to mock the senselessness of war, since few things feel more ordinary than beans. The painting now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it still stops visitors in their tracks with its raw mix of beauty and horror.