Sunday Dalí: Anthropomorphic Bread, 1932. Oil on canvas.

Dalí said, “Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful.” Dalí overcame his fears of sexual intercourse and spend a blissful two months with Gala in Spain. After finishing a meal Dalí became fascinated by a piece of long baguette. Having sucked the top of it, he pressed the softened end into the table where it remained in a vertical position. Dalí declared that this phenomenon “summarized the whole spiritual experience of the period.”

The painting demonstrates how Dalí used paranoiac association to link inanimate objects with animate ones and manufactured objects can assume a biological significance. The watch and the rope that holds the bread erect suggest Dalí’s new phobia: impotence. Of the inkwell, Dalí said, “What could be more degrading and aesthetic than to see this bread-ink-stand become gradually stained in the course of use with the involuntary splatterings of ‘Pelican ink’? … one had only to have one’s break-ink-well changed every morning just as one changes one’s sheets…”

Notes from: Paul Moorhouse, Dalí, (London: PRC Publishing Ltd., 1990), 58.