Basket of Bread or Basket of Bread-Rather Death Than Shame is a painting by SpanishSurrealistSalvador Dalí. The painting depicts a heel of a loaf bread in a basket, sitting near the edge of a table. Dalí used of bread in his paintings, which are said to contain messages about the political context at the time of the painting, his progression as an artist and his societal beliefs.
Progression and comparison to ''The Basket of Bread'' (1926)
Dalí used bread in many of his paintings, and was quoted as saying: At 22, Dalí spent four months on the 1926 painting The Basket of Bread'', of which he said: "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 loaf of bread, 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 wrote 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 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, shot himself before he could be captured 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 culturaldining 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 revealed. 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.
