Focus on this artwork and analyze the 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", in 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 cultural dining 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.
Adolf Hitler National Socialism cultural atomic bombs Japan militaristic German atavistic painting ideological