Salvador Dali Burning Giraffe, c.1937

Dali painted "Burning Giraffe" during his exile in the United States. Although Dali declared himself apolitical, "I am Dali, and only that.", this painting shows his personal struggle with the battle in his home country. Characteristic are the opened draws in the blue female figure, which Dali on a later date described as "Femme-coccyx" (tail bone woman). This phenomenon can be traced back to Freud's psychoanalytical method, much admired by Dali. He regarded him as an enormous step forward for civilization, witness his remark. "The only difference between immortal Greece and our era is Sigmund Freud who discovered that the human body, which in Greek times was merely neoplatonical, is now filled with secret drawers only to be opened through psychoanalysis." The opened drawers in this expressive, propped up female figure thus refer to the inner, subconscious within man. In Dali's own words his paintings form "a kind of allegory which serves to illustrate a certain insight, to follow the numerous narcissistic smells which ascend from each of our drawers." In the distance is a giraffe with its back on fire. Dalí first used the burning giraffe image in his 1930 film L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age). It appears again in 1937 in the painting The Invention of Monsters. Dalí described this image as “the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster.” He believed it to be a premonition of war.