A 1936 Dalí masterpiece is coming to St. Petersburg

Salvador Dalí painted Soft Construction with Boiled Beans in 1936, a typically unsettling oil depicting a monstrous figure tearing itself apart on a barren landscape.

The Surrealist master subtitled the work Premonition of Civil War, and indeed the bloody Spanish Civil War erupted only a few months after the painting was unveiled.

Salvador Dalí, “Soft Contrsuction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936 oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will go on view at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg Oct. 29.

“Soft Construction with Boiled Beans is one of the most powerful paintings Dalí ever made, and seeing it alongside our collection gives visitors the chance to understand it within the full arc of his career,” said Dr. Jennifer Cohen, the museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs.

“Here, you can see where this painting came from, and how the anxieties it captured continued to shape his work for years to come.”

According to the website dalipaintings.com, studies for the work, dating to 1934, have been discovered, and that the artist “may have changed the name of the painting after the war in a manner of proving this prophetic quality, though it is not entirely certain.”

Dalí himself described Soft Construction with Boiled Beans as “a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation.”

The allegorical painting, which measures 39.4 x 39 inches, has drawn comparisons to Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s well-known, wall-sized antiwar masterpiece.

The Dalí Museum is creating an installation within its permanent collection galleries, featuring black-and-white imagery and historical commentary exploring the political and social divisions that preceded the Spanish Civil War.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans will be on view through April 19, 2027.