This is another excellent example of Dalí's surrealist works and is also owned by The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. It shows three shapely, but enigmatic young women, standing on a beach, holding several orchestral instruments that are fluid and seem to be sliding away in the same way that Dalí's melting watches do. Again, in the background we have the landscape of Catalonia, the rocky crags that line the Mediterranean Sea near Port Lligat and Cape Creus.
    He morphs their black heights with a sandy beach, while the women themselves are portrayed with heads of flowers, which were a Dalínian symbol for sexuality. The tuba may be a direct reference to Rene Magritte, who once drew a tuba that had seemed to burst into flames. The scene also includes a melting cello and a piano skin. These objects are probably references back to the Pichot family that Dalí so greatly admired as a youth.

   The dreamlike character of this scene comes from its barren landscape - the Bay of Port Lligat - rendered in minute detail, and the figures, who seem entranced in a pure atmosphere devoid of air.

    Dalí believed that both The Burning Giraffe and The Invention of Monsters were premonitions of war. Both of these paintings contain the image of a giraffe with its back ablaze, an image which Dalí interpreted as "the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster". He first used this image of the giraffe in flames in his film L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) in 1930.
    The Burning Giraffe appears as very much a dreamscape, not simply because of the subject but also because of the supernatural aquamarine color of the background. Against this vivid blue color, the flames on the giraffe stand out to great effect.
    In the foreground, a woman stands with her arms outstretched. Her forearms and face are blood red, having been stripped to show the muscle beneath the flesh. The woman's face is featureless now, indicating a nightmarish helplessness and a loss of individuality. Behind her, a second woman holds aloft a strip of meat, representing death, entrophy, and the human races capacity to devour and destroy. The women both have elongated phallic shapes growing out from their backs, and these are propped up with crutches - Dalí repeatedly uses this symbolism for a weak and flawed society.

    The Invention of the Monsters is part of a series of works that one might term as tumultuous, painted by Dalí between 1935 and 1940; the most important among them are Impressions of Africa; Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War; and Autumn Cannibalism. These three paintings reflect the troubled times before World War II. In the book Dalí de Gala, the painter has written about the Premonition of Civil War and Autumn Cannibalism: "These Iberian people devouring each other in autumn express the pathos of civil war thought of a phenomenon of natural history." In The Invention of the Monsters, Dalí has painted his premonition of World War II. Dalí began the picture in 1937, in Paris, in his studio on rue de la Tombe-Issoire and resumed work on it at the winter-sports resort of Semmering, south of Vienna. When Dalí learned that the Art Institute of Chicago had acquired this work, he sent a telegram with the following explanation: "Am happy and honored by your acquisition. According to Nostradamus, the apparition of monsters is a presage of war. This canvas was painted in the mountains of Semmering a few months before the Anschluss and it has a prophetic character. The women-horses represent the maternal river-monsters, the flaming giraffe the male cosmic apocalyptic monster. The angel-cat is the divine heterosexual monster, the hour-glass the metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí together the sentimental monster. The little lonely blue dog is not a true monster." The theme of the women-horses that one sees here in a herd bathing in a pond is the same as in Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion. Here the shapes have changed completely: three years later they will give birth to a series of pictures entitled The Marsupial Centaurs. About the double figure seen in the foreground, holding a butterfly and an hourglass in his hands, the painter has stated precisely that it was the Pre-Raphaelite result of the double portrait of Dalí and Gala painted right behind it.

    Dalí's inspiration for this painting came from a conversation overheard between two fishermen discussing a local man who would stare at himself in a mirror for hours. One of the men described the man as having a "bulb in his head"; a colloquium meaning that he was mentally ill. Dalí combined this image with the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and was transformed into the flower that bears his name after his death.
    The hand on the right that holds an egg, out of which a narcissus flower grows, echoes the configuration of Narcissus and his reflection in the lake. The same configuration occurs again at the top of the mountains that are directly above the figure of Narcissus, who stands on a dais admiring his body. The familiar sight of ants and a scavenging dog both appear around the hand, symbolizing the death and decay that has taken place.
    The Metamorphosis of Narcissus was painted using oil on canvas, while Dalí and Gala were traveling in Italy. The influence of the great Italian masters on Dalí can be seen in the Classical mythic theme to his use of color and form.

    This composition and another canvas, entitled Palladio's Corridor of Dramatic Surprise, were painted in Paris, rue de l'Universite, after Dalí and Gala had spent a long sojourn in Italy, particularly in the region of Vicenza, where the painter could see the palaces, the villas, the Olympic Theater of Vicenza, and the other buildings in the vicinity designed by the Italian genius Andrea di Pietro, called Palladio, the most important architect of the sixteenth century. One may read the following comment on these pictures in the catalogue of the Dalí exhibition in 1970 at the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum: "In these paintings, named for the Italian architect Palladio, the mannerist and baroque influences are obvious: mannerism in the figures with elongated shapes, baroque in the postures, the movements, the light treated in the style of Magnasco. The proportions of the trompe l'oeil architectural scenery of the Olympic Theater at Vicenza have been adopted by Dalí. For the scenery he has substituted rows of human figures which, by the shortened perspectives, suggest great depth." The little girl who is seen running in the sun, at the end of the corridor formed by the figures, appears several times in the pictures of the Surrealist period. Dalí has explained that she was the result of two combined memories: his cousin playing with a hoop and the bell in the tower of the school in Figueras that his sister attended.

    Sleep was painted for Edward James, a British millionaire who was Dalí's patron from 1936 to 1939. Sleep deals with a subject that fascinated the Surrealists: the world of dreams. They believed that the freedom of the subconscious within sleep could be tapped into and then used creatively.
    Sleep is a visual rendering of the body's collapse into sleep, as if into a separate state of being. Against a deep blue summer sky, a huge disembodied head with eyes dissolved in sleep, hangs suspended over an almost empty landscape. The head is "soft", appearing both vulnerable and distorted; what should be a neck tapers away to drop limply over a crutch. A dog appears, its head in a crutch, as if half asleep itself.
    The head is propped above the land by a series of wooden crutches. The mouth, nose and also the eyes are all held in place by the crutches, suggesting that the head might disintegrate if they were removed. Crutches were a familiar sight in Dalí's work. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist wrote that he had imagined sleep as a heavy monster that was "held up by the crutches of reality".

    Swans Reflecting Elephants contains one of Dalí's famous double images. The double images were a major part of Dalí's "paranoia-critical method", which he put forward in his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational". He explained his process as a "spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena". Dalí used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties.
    As with the earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In The Metamorphosis of Narcissus the reflection of Narcissus is used to mirror the shape of the hand on the right of the picture. Here, the three swans in front of bleak, leafless trees are reflected in the lake so that the swans' heads become the elephants' heads and the trees become the bodies of the elephants.
    In the background of the painting is a Catalonian landscape depicted in fiery fall colors, the brushwork creating swirls in the cliffs that surround the lake, to contrast with the cool stillness of the water.

    Mountain Lake, also called Beach with Telephone, was painted using oil on canvas. The telephone was a key image for Dalí during the late Thirties, as seen in his famous Lobster Telephone in 1936. Dalí believed this painting was a premonition of the Second World War. In Mountain Lake, as with The Enigma of Hitler (1936), the telephone can be interpreted as referring to the telephone negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler to seal the Munich Agreement made in 1938.
    The telephone handle is hanging by a crutch, signifying the fragility of the peace that the telephone negotiations have created. To stress this point further, there are snails crawling up the crutch and on to the handle of the phone; Dalí was fascinated with all creatures that have their own shell, with their protected softness and their hidden vulnerability.
    The mountains in the background are reflected in the lake beneath the phone to give a double image: the lake can also be seen as a fish with the ripples on it forming the scales and the jagged rock to the left forming a tail. Some have seen the image as phallic, with the solitary rock to the right suggesting a female counterpart.

    Dalí began to become fascinated with and influenced by more and more classical themes as the 1930's drew to a close. Although the detail in the faces of the three figures on the beach is not easily seen in this scan, the faces of the two graces on the left show considerable influence by Leonardo da Vinci.
    The figure to the far right has a head formed from a distant landscape seen through a hole in the rocks, and the middle graces facial features are made up from details of the beach. Both show how Baroque and Renaissance painters were becoming increasingly important to Dalí. As he studied these periods of art history, Dalí slowly incorporated more and more aspects of their work into his own. This was not at all strange, seeing that he had been absorbing new artistic techniques since the age of 10.
    Finally, the grace to the far left of the painting has an even simpler form, and her head is made up from a black rock lying on the beach. All told, Dalí is again experimenting with the idea of double imagery, and this painting is one of the better examples to date.

    This composition is probably the best example of paranoiac-critical activity in operation in the paintings done by Dalí. He is not satisfied with pursuing a double image but succeeds in accumulating and making rise simultaneously, or one after another according to the particular capacity of the viewer, six different subjects, thus justifying the title The Endless Enigma which he gave to this picture.
    The subjects are in succession: a reclining philosopher; a greyhound lying down; a mythological beast; the face of the great Cyclopean, Cretin; a mandolin; a compotier of fruits and figs on a table; and finally a woman seen from the back mending a sail. One can perceive here, besides, appearing in the corner at the right, the upper part of Gala's face with a turban on her head and at the bottom left, balanced on a stick, the skeletal remains of a grilled sardine. Several times during the same period Dalí depicted grilled sardines, placed in dishes, together with telephones, such as : Beach with Telephone, The Sublime Moment, Imperial Violets, or The Enigma of Hitler, in all of which this instrument symbolizes the period of great political tension in Europe which preceded World War II, particularly at the time of Munich, when the telephone played such an important role in the negotiations between the Allies and Hitler. Most of these pictures, including The Endless Enigma, were started - indeed, almost all were painted - at the estate of Coco Chanel, "La Paula," at Roquebrune on the Cote d'Azur.

    Impressions of Africa is a misleading title as Dalí never visited the continent; the title is taken from a play by Raymond Roussel, who was greatly admired for his double meanings - the literal equivalent of Dalí's double visual images. In the background, there are groups of figures clustered together; several are double images or visual illusions. Gala's face is the most dominant image; she appears ghostly, her eyes formed by the dark arches of the building behind her.
    In the foreground of the painting is Dalí, one hand reaching out toward the viewer; he has used a foreshortening technique here so that his arm appears almost in 3D. He was greatly interested in techniques that enabled him to create a feeling of space, distance, and depth. During 1938, Dalí was traveling in Italy, ostensibly to study the great Italian artists' techniques. His face is only partially visible and it is in shadow so that the one staring eye that we can see appears more distinct. Dalí wanted to give an impression of extreme concentration, to convey the idea that he is trying to "see like a medium"; to capture subliminal images to be recorded on his easel.

    The title of Invisible Afghan with the Apparition refers to Frederico Garcia Lorca, with whom Dalí formed an intense relationship with in the early Twenties. Lorca was shot and killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1936; this may explain his "apparition" in this painting.
    Invisible Afghan is a visual illusion that consists of many objects that, when viewed together, are interpreted by the eye to be one of three possible images. The strongest image is a face that comprizes an urn and two men's heads. A fruit dish with pears also appears, formed by the shape of the rocks against the sea with the urn becoming the base. The third image is that of a very vague dog, formed by the swirling clouds, the head resting on the cliffs, its paws painted in sketchily.
    Whilst employing double images such as those seen in The Invisible Man, Invisible Afghan with the Apparition is a study of the interlocking forms of three images. Dalí used the same three interlocking forms for two other paintings in 1938, The Endless Enigma and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach; the latter bears a close resemblance to Invisible Afghan with the Apparition.

    The figure of the woman leaning her elbow on a night stand symbolizes the Spanish Civil War. Dalí wrote in his Secret Life: "Throughout all martyrized Spain rose an odor of incense, of the burning flesh of priests, of spiritual quartered flesh, mixed with the powerful scent of the sweat of mobs fornicating among themselves and with Death." The torso and the face of the female figure are made up of groups of Renaissance warriors, of condottieri, inspired by a combat of horsemen done by Leonardo da Vinci. Although signed in 1938, this picture was probably started sooner. The other very remarkable works of this series are The Great Paranoiac, Paranoia, Perspectives, and Head of a Woman Having the Form of a Battle. Dalí exhibited nearly all these paintings together in a one-man show that he, aided by Gala, organized in February 1939 in the studio where the couple was living on the rue de la Tombe-Issoire in Paris. Friends and society people came to see this exhibition of paranoiac-critical activity, and Dalí remembers that the first to arrive and the last to leave was Picasso, who asked especially to see Spain.