Basket of Bread

Progression and comparison to The Basket of Bread (1926)

Dalí has used bread in many of his paintings, he explains:

"Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism."

At 22, Dalí spent four months on the 1926 painting The Basket of Bread, of which he explains: "by the power of its density, the fascination of its immobility, creates the mystical, 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."

The subject of this article, painted and completed in Monterey, California in 1945, he described to Luis Romero as "the most esoteric and the most Surrealist of anything I have painted to date," where the painting is even more dynamic by having the basket of bread placed on the edge of the table, giving a strong sense of forthcoming "borderline of dematerialization" than the painting of 1926.

Political context

Dalí writes in the Bignou Gallery of New York catalogue that he painted Basket 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".

The painting's subtitle, Rather Death than Shame, takes on special significance during this time period. The basket is precariously situated on the edge of the uncovered table, against a starkly black backdrop, an omen to its own sacrificial destruction.

Adolf Hitler, a well-recorded subject by Dalí, chose death rather than the inevitable shame of capture 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 the German people sought relief through Hitler and National Socialism. Dalí writes that Hitler's followers were "systematically cretinized by machinism" and "ideological disorder", to 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 a cultural 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.

The painting was also said by Dalí to have been painted the week the atomic bombs fell on Japan. "My objective was to arrive at the immobility of the pre-explosive object", Dalí reveals. Taken in the context of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Rather Death than Shame" could also mean that it's better to have died a victim than bear the shame of having dropped the bombs.

Marshall Plan

Basket of Bread was used as propaganda for the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan from 1947 to 1951. The Marshall Plan, which earned General George C. Marshall the Nobel Peace Prize, is credited with rebuilding European nations by restoring agricultural and industrial production and thereby restoring food supply and economic infrastructure in the aftermath of World War II.

More information

In the 1940s, William Nichols, managing editor of This Week, saw an artist's work in an art gallery. Finding the piece, a painting of a loaf of bread, one of the most charming paintings he had ever seen he printed it in his magazine giving the artist in question his first mass audience. This Week Magazine, a syndicated Sunday magazine, at one time had a circulation of 15 million, the biggest in the world.

The painting resides in Figueres Teatre-Museu Dalí, containing the broadest range of works of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), managed by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation.