| The figure of the woman leaning her elbow on a night stand symbolizes the Spanish Civil War. Dal� 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. Dal� 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 Dal� remembers that the first to arrive and the last to leave was Picasso, who asked especially to see Spain. |
