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| Basket of Bread | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Salvador Dalí |
| Year | 1945 |
| Medium | Oil on panel |
| Dimensions | 33 cm × 38 cm (13 in × 15 in) |
| Location | Dalí Theatre and Museum,Figueres |
Basket of Bread orBasket of Bread-Rather Death Than Shame is an oilpainting bySpanishSurrealist artistSalvador Dalí, from 1945. The painting depicts a heel of a loaf bread in a basket, sitting near the edge of a table.
Dalí used bread in many of his paintings, and was quoted as saying:
At 22, Dalí spent four months on the 1926 paintingThe Basket of Bread, of which he said: "by the power of its density, the fascination of its immobility, creates themystical,paroxysmic feeling of a situation beyond our ordinary notion of the real. We are at the borderline of dematerialization of matter by the sole power of the mind."[3]
The loaf of bread, painted and completed inMonterey, California in 1945, he described to Luis Romero as "the mostesoteric and the mostSurrealist of anything I have painted to date,"[4] where the painting is even more dynamic [than the 1926 version] by having the basket of bread placed on the edge of the table, giving a strong sense of forthcoming "borderline of dematerialization".[3]
In the catalog of his exhibition atBignou Gallery, New York in late 1945, Dalí's entry for the portraitGalarina draws attention to howGala Dalí's crossed arms resemble the basket and her naked breast resembles the bread, and how Gala has become his bread basket.[5]
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Dalí wrote in the Bignou Gallery of New York catalogue that he paintedBasket of Bread in two months, when "the most staggering and sensational episodes of contemporary history took place" and finished "one day before the end of the war".[6]
The painting's subtitle,Rather Death than Shame, takes on special significance during this time period. The basket is situated on the edge of the uncovered table, against a starkly black backdrop, an omen to its own sacrificial destruction.[6]
Adolf Hitler, a well-recorded subject by Dalí[citation needed], shot himself before he could be captured on April 30, 1945. In Dalí's essay, "The Conquest of the Irrational" written in 1935, Dalí speaks of a "moral hunger" of the modern age that theGerman people sought relief through Hitler andNational Socialism. Dalí writes that Hitler's followers were "systematically cretinized by machinism" and "ideological disorder", in which they "seek in vain to bite into the senile and triumphant softness of the plump,atavistic, tender,militaristic, and territorial back of any Hitlerian nursemaid." Further, this "irrational hunger is placed before acultural dining table on which are found only ... cold and insubstantial leftovers." Hitler portrayed as the heel of a loaf of bread, on the edge of a precipice, sums up Dalí's opinion of Hitler and his ultimate demise.[6]
The painting was also said by Dalí to have been painted the week theatomic bombs fell onJapan. "My objective was to arrive at the immobility of the pre-explosive object", Dalí revealed.[2]
Basket of Bread was used for the European Recovery Program, better known as theMarshall Plan[4] from 1947 to 1951. The Marshall Plan, which earnedGeneral George C. Marshall theNobel Peace Prize, is credited with rebuildingEuropean nations by restoring agricultural and industrial production and thereby restoring food supply and economicinfrastructure in the aftermath ofWorld War II.[7]
In the 1940s, William Nichols, managing editor ofThis Week, asyndicated Sunday magazine, saw the picture in anart gallery. Finding it one of the most charming paintings he had ever seen he printed it in his magazine, giving Dali his firstmass audience.This Week Magazine, at one time had acirculation of 15 million, the largest in the world.[4]
The painting resides inFigueres Teatre-Museu Dalí, containing the broadest range of works of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), managed by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation.[8]
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