Programme 11: World War II

The Art Works

Title: Mountain Lake
Artist: Salvador Dalí
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1938

The lake of the title sits on a flat plain, with rivers flowing into it from the left, and mountains in the background. The murky browns and greens give a sense of foreboding, and the unease is strengthened by an old-fashioned telephone propped up on a crutch in the middle of the painting with snails crawling across it. The telephone wire, trailing on another crutch, is cut off.

The artist, Salvador Dalí (1904–89), was one of the most important representatives of Surrealism. The Surrealists’ interest was not so much in what we can see, but in what we can imagine – the world of our subconscious mind. They liked anything that could trigger the imagination, and things in this painting can be read in more than one way. The rivers flowing into the lake look a bit like a tail, and the lake could be the fish itself. The flat area on which the fish/lake rests has straight lines around it – it could be a tabletop. The outline of the large mountain combined with the lower edge of the lake has the same profile as a whale, and the smaller mountain to the right could be a smaller whale face to face with the first. Or is the smaller ‘whale’ a bowl of food resting on the table?

Within this landscape of multiple possibilities the telephone is clearly not working – as well as being ‘cut off’ the crutches suggest it is ‘disabled’. This reveals Dalí’s interest in the negotiations between the leaders of Britain and Germany, Chamberlain and Hitler, before World War II. Although they may have been talking to one another, he suggests, as we now know, that they were not actually communicating.

Title: Three Studies for figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Artist: Francis Bacon
Medium: Oil on board, three panels
Date: c.1944

A Crucifixion, a painting of the death of Jesus, would traditionally include the grief-filled figures of his mother Mary and his disciple John standing at the foot of the cross – other onlookers might also be included. Bacon here shows us the anguish of the onlookers and implies the agony of the victim, without actually showing someone dying. The paintings express the extreme suffering caused by the war. When they were first exhibited they were considered almost unbearable to look at, and made Francis Bacon (1909–92) instantly famous.

The work is a triptych, that is painted in three sections, which was a common format for altarpieces in churches, and one that Bacon continued to use throughout his career. Despite the implication that we are looking at studies of the mourning relatives, Bacon used a variety of photographic sources to create these images, including the faces of Nazi leaders shouting propaganda at the hypnotized masses: the anger of the oppressor has been transformed into the grief of the victim.

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