Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone 1938

Salvador Dalí painted ‘Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone’ and what I see is a fever dream. It’s all these weird, dark, muted greens and browns, like something rotting but still alive. I wonder what Dalí was thinking, wrestling with these strange, haunting images. The horse, not quite alive, not quite machine, it’s got this bony, skeletal quality, like a nightmare steed. And the way he painted it, this nervous energy, the scratchy lines – you can almost feel his hand moving, searching for the form, never quite finding it. The telephone line dangling from the horse's mouth looks like a cord has been cut. It reminds me of Picasso's Guernica, a similar sense of dread, of something broken. Artists riff off each other, you know? An ongoing conversation about what it means to be human, to feel, to see. That's what painting is, isn't it? A way of trying to make sense of the world, even when it doesn't make any sense at all.