To Dalí, solitude was a precious thing. He spent long hours on his own and this isolation was important to his creative process. Before he and Gala were intimately involved, Dalí had had impulses to throw her off the high cliffs they walked along. Dalí explained this as due to his fear of her love. He saw Gala as a threat to his very self; "she too had come to destroy and annihilate my solitude".
    The landscape within Solitude is bleak; the sky almost colorless and the land is darkened by shadow. On the left of the painting, leaning against a rock is a lean, naked man. The man's head seems made from the rock itself, inside there are several egg-shaped stones. On the right shoulder of the man is a hole in the flesh out of which shells and fossils spill; Dalí had a fascination with crustaceans because of their built-in ability to protect their own vulnerable, soft inner selves. This visual rendering of solitude also appears, in the same posture, in the 1929 painting Illumined Pleasures, next to a self-portrait.

    From Dalí's work, figures with drawers are almost as well known to the public as his "soft watches", particularly his sculpture Venus de Milo with Drawers. In order to paint this figure of a woman half-lying on the ground, Dalí did several very elaborate preliminary drawings in pencil and in ink. They were all executed at Edward James's residence in London, where Dalí was living. It is probably there that he began the picture. Anthropomorphic Cabinet was exhibited, for the first time, in London in 1936 at the Lefevre Gallery. Dalí, who had been a great admirer of Freud for many years, purposely wished to depict here in images the psychoanalytical theories of the great Viennese professor, saying apropos these subjects that "they are kinds of allegories destined to illustrate a certain complacency, to smell the innumerable narcissistic odors emanating from each one of our drawers," and more precisely later, "The unique difference between immortal Greece and the contemporary epoch is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, which was purely neo-platonian at the time of the Greeks, is today full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable of opening." The furniture-figures of the seventeenth-century Italian mannerist Bracelli were known by Dalí and undoubtedly influenced his figures with drawers, but what was only a game and a geometric exercise in space to the first artist became to the second one, three centuries later, an allegorical representation charged with the great obsessional power of our will to know who we are.

    As with many artists, Dalí was to depict war and conflict in several of his major works. Autumn Cannibalism was painted in 1936, the year the civil war began in Spain. The painting is an evocative interpretation of the horror and destruction of war, and also comments on the devoring nature of sexual relationships.
    On a chest of drawers placed on a Catalonian beach sit the top halves of two people. They are so entangled that the viewer has to look carefully to see which arm belongs to which figure. One figure holds a fork pointed to the other one's head, while it dips a spoon into the malleable flesh. A languid hand holds a gleaming knife that has sliced into the soft flesh of the other. Their featureless heads merge into each other, their individuality becoming indistinguishable.
    Pieces of meat are draped about the painting, symbolizing death. The meat also alludes to the temporary nature of life and to the bestial nature of human beings. On one head is an apple, which to Dalí represented a struggle between father and son, (the son being the apple, the father William Tell), and beneath the figures is a peeled apple, symbolizing the destruction of the son.

    This landscape belongs to the series of small paintings in the Edward James collection. It was in September 1970 that Dalí gave it the title Geological Justice; the original title was Anthropomorphism Extra-Flat. The picture was shown for the first time in London in 1936 at the Lefevre Gallery.
    Later Dalí gave this explanation: "A sort of landscapefigure stretched out on the ground, the two arms crushed and open. It was a vision I had one time at Port Lligat of the sea at ebbtide on one of those days when it goes out farther than ordinarily. I saw a phenomenon of stones when the sea was pushed out by the currents and the tramontana. There were stones which formed a kind of sea-wall, the furrows making it look like a figure. Instead of putting it in Port Lligat, I placed it in surroundings which are more like the immense beach at Rosas, very obvious on an infinite stretch of shore. The rocks in the background must be those near Bagur witL the little Medas islands. It's the sea, but everything blends with the earth. The colors are very good. It is a question of the phenomenon of the tide, a minitide of the Mediterranean, there where there is practically none, but enough just the same, so that it produces even more of an effect."
    Geological Justice was painted on a wooden panel in Port Lligat. As for many other pictures, the panel of olive wood was prepared by a carpenter called Costa who was shot during the Civil War; it was he who carved the frames, following the exact silhouettes, for Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds. Geological Justice is a wonderful mixture of earth, beach, sea, waves, wind, gulf, and familiar coast - all of this inspired by a fleeting and limited vision from the accumulation of moments lived, but with an exceptional change of size.

   According to Dalí's explanation, "This face formed with people from the Ampurdan, who are the greatest paranoiacs, was painted after having a conversation about Arcimboldo with Jose Maria Sert." The ability of the viewer to see these pictures as double images depends on his "degree of paranoia," meaning his ability to systematically organize the hallucinations produced by dreams.

    Here is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing of the innumerable illustrations, pen or pencil drawings, gouaches, or watercolors produced by Dalí before World War II for the most glamorous fashion magazines. This one was done during the winter of 1936 while Dalí and Gala were spending a few days at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Dalí thinks he remembers that it was probably destined for Harper's Bazaar or Vogue. For him, the interesting part of this creation stems from the idea that he imagined during winter sports, with snow plainly visible, an outfit that suggests sun baths, since one can easily discover four openings by rolling up a sort of shade in order to expose the body.
    Most of the costumes created by Dalí possess an obvious erotic power. Here, we don't know at exactly what moment the outfit becomes skin, covering, coat - indeed even a closet, cupboard, or a window - since this tunic-dress has a front zipper and can at the same time be opened wide by turning the cremone bolt which is pictured on it. Dalí has always liked to associate with society people and dress designers. In a taped interview, summarized later in his Le Journal d'un genie, he told me apropos of his snobbism: "During the Surrealist period, it was a regular strategy. Besides Rene Crevel, I was the only one who associated with society people and who was accepted by them; the other Surrealists did not know this set, and were not admitted there. In front of them I could always get up quickly and say, 'I am going to a dinner party in town,' letting them imagine or speculate with whom - they would find this out the next day, and it was even better that they should learn this from intermediaries, that it had been a dinner at the Prince Faucigny Lucinge's home or at the house of people whom they looked upon as forbidden fruit since they were not received by them. Immediately afterwards, when I arrived at the houses of the society people, I practiced another type of snobbism which was much more acute; I used to say, 'I must leave very early right after the coffee, to see the Surrealist group,' which I described to them as a group that was much more difficult to enter than the aristocracy or any of the people they knew, because the Surrealists sent me insulting letters and found the society people to be 'ass-heads' who knew absolutely nothing... Snobbism consists of always being able to penetrate into places to which others have no access; this gives the others an awful feeling of inferiority... I must add something else: I was incapable of keeping up with all the gossip about everyone and I never knew who had quarreled with whom. Like the comedian Harry Langdon, I always appeared in places where I should not have gone... But I myself, Dalí, imperturbable, I used to go to the Beaumonts, then I would pay a visit to the Lopezes without knowing anything about their quarrels, or, if I did know about it, I didn't pay the least attention to it; it was the same way with Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, who had a real civil war going in the fashion world. I used to eat lunch with the former, take tea with the latter, and in the evening dine with the first one; all this caused great waves of jealousy. I am one of those rare people who have lived in the most paradoxical circles, those most impenetrable to each other, who go in and out of them at will. I did it out of pure snobbism, that is to say because of a frenetic desire to be constantly seen in all the most inaccessible sets."
    Later, the painter was to say in the course of an interview: "The constant tragedy of human life is fashion, and that is why I have always liked to collaborate with Mlle Chanel and Mme Schiaparelli, just to prove that the idea of dressing oneself, the idea of disguising oneself, was only the consequence of the traumatic experience of birth, which is the strongest of all the traumas that a human being can experience, since it is the first. Fashion is also the tragic constant of history; through it you always see war coming while watching its fashion reviews and its parades of mannequins who themselves are veritable exterminating angels."

   In this work, the mortal connotation of foodstuffs is more aggressively expressed. This is not a banquet, but quite the contrary - there is no choice of foods. The last resources are within the strangulated body, from which nothing edible can emerge. Dalí thus expresses his tragic and premonitory anguish about the war.

    Salvador Dalí's greatest intellectual and artistic honesty is probably never to have practiced any sophisticated, gymnastic aesthetics, in order to place the most disparate and most bizarre objects in his pictures. Sun Table is a good example of this. When he painted this composition, Dalí did not know why he put a camel in with all the other elements which belonged to Cadaqués. Today he explains the premonitional character of this image by pointing out the package of Camel cigarettes placed at the feet of the silhouette of the young boy, probably himself, and he told me in 1970 that he had read an article by Martin Gardner which appeared in the magazine Scientific American under the heading "scientific games," in which the author explained that "the image on the cover of a package of cigarettes was full of extraordinary objective hazards - for example, the English word 'choice' written vertically in capital letters on the side of the package, when looked at in a mirror, remains unchanged and perfectly legible." In order to stress the out-of-context and obsessive character of a camel with all the magical aspects associated with the animal, Dalí wrote later in his book Dix recettes d'immortalite that "seen through an electronic microscope it is possible to demonstrate that a camel is much less precise than a cloud." The table in the middle of the picture is a table from the cafe Le Casino in Cadaqués, on which are placed one duro and three glasses, the same glasses in which today is still served tallat, the Catalonian coffee with cream. The tiled floor is what was being put in Dalí's kitchen at the time that he was painting this picture, having installed himself at a glass-topped table in the dining room of the house in Port Lligat.