Sunday Dalí: Invisible Afghan with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with Three Figs, 1938.

Garcia Lorca was a good friend of Dalí’s who was shot an killed in 1936 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. That may explain why his face is an apparition in this painting.

Invisible Afghan is an example of the multiple-image technique Dalí was using frequently in the height of his surreal period. The most apparent image is a face that comprises an urn and two men’s heads. The top of the face’s head is a fruit dish with pears which is formed by the shape of the rocks against the sea with the urn becoming the base. The third image is that of a very vague dog, formed by the swirling clouds, the head resting on the cliffs, its paws painted in sketchily. Off to the left is the woman from Millet’s Angelus.

Dalí used double images to obsessively trick the eye into seeing both images provoking a mental crisis in the viewer. That obsessive mental instability formed the crux of Dalí’s paranoic-critial technique.