Necrophilic Spring Flowing from a Grand Piano shows one of the many appearances that grand pianos make in Dalí's work during the Thirties. Dalí explained their Surrealistic appearance on the beaches or plains in his paintings, as a sight he had seen in reality: the Pitchot family, who were close friends of the Dalís, performed outdoor concerts, sometimes going to the extent of bringing a grand piano with them.
    The piano has a puddle-shaped hole in the middle of its back, out of which a cypress tree grows. Cypress trees often appear in Dalí's paintings of the Thirties, for example in The Dream Approaches (1932). These trees reminded Dalí of the Pitchot estate, where he would spend long, happy hours in erotic daydreams.
    The word "necrophilic" in the title recalls Dalí's neurotic fears that penetrative sex would lead to his death. The hole in the piano seems reflective as if filled with water; it is the origin of the "necrophilic spring". From the middle of the piano underneath the keys, the spring flows into a piano-shaped hole in the ground. This hole insinuates a grave and death, so that the spring has become a necrophiliac.

   "I like chops and I like my wife. I don't see any reason not to paint them together," was Dalí's reply to a journalist astonished by this picture. Eight years later, he would paint his own self-portrait with a rasher of grilled bacon.

    The Triangular Hour was painted using oil on canvas. After their first appearance in The Persistence of Memory (1933), Dalí's "soft watches" were to become a regular image throughout his work.
    The watch in The Triangular Hour differs from other "soft watches" in that it has no metal casing. In addition it appears to be actually made from stone; it has a crack across its face that is similar to the cracks in the rock that it is placed on. It also does not appear as melted, as "soft", as other watches seen in earlier paintings; here it is merely misshapen.
    The watch is mounted on a rock formation as if hung on a kitchen wall. Underneath is a hole in the rock through which we see an Ampordan plain, where the figure of a child with a hoop can be seen. At the top of the rock formation is the bust of a Classical man, his face in a grimace. Dalí has placed rocks on top of the bust, as well as on top of the rock formation and on the other rock in the shadowy foreground. One interpretation of this painting is that Dalí is viewing mankind and time as governed by the solidity of nature.

    Allegory of an American Christmas was painted while Dalí and Gala were on the first of what was to become many visits to the US. The country had long intrigued Dalí and on this first trip he was greatly impressed with it, especially with the media, who afforded him the attention that he needed and craved. Dalí loved the idea of a "new country" and the opportunities he saw there; these feelings are reflected in the painting.
    Dalí used the image of an egg-shaped stone often during the Thirties. As a form that represents a human head, it can be seen in Illumined Pleasures. In the Allegory of an American Christmas, as with the later painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the egg produces the idea of a hatching, or a birth of something new; of a change taking place. Here, the huge stone egg fills the painting, hovering ominously over the flat, blue land. The dark clouds on the horizon heighten the atmosphere of expectancy. A distorted golden plane is breaking free from a hole in the egg. The black hole forms the shape of northern US, with South America painted in golden colors beneath it.

   Found here and in other Dalí dreamscapes, the smooth and compact shapes with cavities are reminiscent of the Cape of Creus. A mysterious tension in the picture comes from the parallel between the form suspended over the crutch and the man with little boy facing away from us in the foreground.

    This painting brings both a skull and a grand piano to life, and shows them engaging in some rather disturbing activity. It is an excellent example of the Dalínian interest in Sigmund Freud, and his ideas. This work shows clearly Dalí's understanding of transposition as he imparts anthropomorphic characteristics on both of these inanimate objects. It also shows Dalí's fascination with medical anomalies. Dalí's parents had 'educated' him about sexually transmitted diseases by leaving medical texts about for him to look at. The idea was that he would see some of the horrific deformities and be terrified of sexual contact. The plan worked all too well, and though Dalí was always fascinated by sex, and especially voyeurism, he reportedly never had sex with anyone other than Gala.
    Another result of his examination of these books was a morbid interest in cephalic skulls, skulls that had been badly deformed due to birth defects. A neighbor of the Dalí's in Cape Creus, actually their landlord, had a son who had such a deformity, and Dalí was sure to have seen it. The disturbing thing about this picture is the animation of the always ominous, but dead figure of a skull, and its attack upon the unassertive, and submitting piano. The contrast of that act, with the otherwise normal scene of the individuals enjoying a night out on the sitting wall, creates a surreal quality of unease and shock.

    This composition is entirely imaginary. It was painted in Paris in 1934 in the apartment that Dalí and Gala occupied on the first floor at 88 rue de l'Universite. The artist at work, pictured in the foreground seated in front of his easel, is Vermeer of Delft contemplating the wide plain of Ampurdan. Farther back one sees Dalí as a child in his sailor's suit holding his hoop and standing beside his nurse of the type that he called Hitlerian nurses, much to the great fury of the Surrealists; still farther back two soft forms are coupled - they constitute part of that series of forms, erotic in character, used by Dalí during his Surrealist period which he called "symbols" and of which he gave the following definition in the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism: "Morphological, sub-cutaneous concretion, symbolic of hierarchies." At the lower right two little fragments appear splashed with the morning light. A silhouette, inexplicably and equivocally draped, rises up in front of a row of cypress trees - those that Dalí used to see through the window in the courtyard of his school in Figueras; the lower is reminiscent of the one on the Pichots' property, called the Mill-Tower, near his birthplace; and behind this is a bell-tower typical of Catalonian churches.
    The owner, Mr. Cyrus Sulzberger, considers this picture a real good-luck charm. As a young man, he bought it while visiting the 32nd International Exhibition of Art at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1934, paying for it in installments of five dollars a week. Later he was forced to part with it. Only a few years ago (around 1991), he was able to convince its owner to sell him this painting, without which he could not get along.

    Hairdresser Depressed by the Persistent Good Weather is a good example of Dalí's bizarre choice of titles. They usually refer directly to the subject of the work, describing in detail what he has depicted. One of Dalí's collectors once said that the price of a Dalí painting was merited by the title alone.
    Hairdresser Depressed portrays a depressed hairdresser looking mournfully out at the viewer. The hairdresser and the figures behind him are framed within the picture by the blocks to the left of his head and in front of him. The blocks appear two-toned due to the shadow cast on them, the blue of the shaded block by the hairdresser echoing the blue of the sky.
    Behind the hairdresser stands an old man holding a cloth, his buttocks and skull have been exaggerated. In front of this man, an enormous skin-colored shape seems to be held up by a crutch. We can not see where this phallic object originates from, but the viewer's attention is drawn to it by the angle of the framing building, a trick used in The Masochistic Instrument (1933).

    The Masochistic Instrument interprets a childhood scene in which Dalí manipulated a female fruit-picker into climbing up a ladder placed outside his room in order for her breasts and torso to be framed by his window.
    The viewer's eye is led to the naked woman by the insinuation of the angles that are created between the sloping roof beneath the window and the blue of the sky. The paleness of the woman's skin is highlighted by the use of shadow and by the contrasting, vividly colored walls of the house in which she stands. Her face can not be seen, lending an air of mystery to the piece. In her hand she holds a violin between two fingers as if in disgust. She looks ready to throw the fatigued violin away. It is "soft" and distorted like the cello seen in Daddy Longlegs of the Evening...Hope! (1940). The shape of the violin repeats the female form, but here the inference is that the violin should be read as a phallic object. The erect pole with a piece of cloth flowing from the end of it attached to the tree can also be read as phallic.

    The Moment of Transition was painted in 1934. On the left, a woman dressed entirely in white, the material flowing behind her, stands facing the cart. The image of the woman in white is repeated in several of Dalí's paintings, either directly or suggestively. In Gradiva Finds the Ruins of Anthropomorphis the woman's shape is implied by the shape of the white rocks in the background. This woman was Dalí's first cousin, Carolinetta, who died aged seventeen from consumption, when Dalí was still a child.
    The cart in the painting looks like a hollowed-out bone. On first glance the cart has two people in it, but upon closer inspection, the people take on the form of a building in the town it approaches and the rear end of a horse.
    The Moment of Transition continues the theme of Dalí's painting The Phantom Wagon (1933) in which the same cart, landscape, and visual illusion are shown. In the latter painting, however, the cart appears at a further distance from the town that it heads for. As we see the cart in closer detail in The Moment of Transition Dalí's visual illusion becomes more apparent, explaining the title of the work.