In September 1938, at the Munich Conference, Great Britain, France and Italy tried to prevent war by appeasing Hitler--ceding part of Czechoslovakia to him. The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously said they'd secured "Peace in our time." Dalí's dreams said otherwise. Next year the war began.

Dalí wrote of this painting "It constituted a condensed reportage of a series of dreams obviously occasioned by the events of Munich. This picture appeared to me to be charged with a prophetic value, as announcing the medieval period which was going to spread its shadow over Europe. Chamberlain's umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister aspect, identified with the bat, and affected me as very anguishing at the very time I was painting it..."

The choice to show Chamberlain's iconic umbrella as ghostly and shut has meaning too: the leader of free Europe failed to shield his people from the rain of fire to come. Eric Shanes, my source, notes the lopped branch is an olive, symbol of peace--peace aborted, for appeasement just encouraged Hitler. Shanes and I both see the broken telephone as "a breakdown in communication", but he calls the clear fluid dripping from it "spermlike". To me it looks more like... tears.

Dalí's dreams are already grieving for the loss of his world. Before it's gone.

SOURCE: Salvador Dalí by Eric Shanes, (2014), pp 142-3.

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