'Burning Giraffe' a Haunting Icon in Many of Dali's War Premonition Works

It was late in my long journey of Dalinian discovery that I learned of Giraffe on Fire, this fantastic 1937 gouache on paper, which a few years back was estimated by Christie’s to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000 – and then cashed out at a sizzling $1,870,000!

Dali did several paintings that featured the blatant improbability of a burning giraffe, and most were done in the shadows of impending war. Indeed, Dali is said to have believed that what he called “the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster” – the burning giraffe – was a premonition of war. Here the dark clouds of war, and the burning fires of conflict, seem evident in this stunning, haunting and extraordinarily forceful gouache, which sold at some nine times over its auction estimate, marking something of a turning point in Dali’s prices at auction.

Dwarfed by and looking up at the barbecued beast is a woman whose head has been supplanted by a riot of roses – a frequently seen motif in Dali’s surrealist pictures, including Springtime Necrophilia. Dali would often replace human heads with other objects, and his symbolism in a premonitory war picture here might suggest how the inhumanity of war is a shame cast upon the face of society reduced to savagery.

But there’s another undeniable interpretation of Dali’s flaming animal – in this case we also see what looks like a cow or bull on fire at left – and that may be the abject disparity or paradox of such a compelling image. We simply don’t think of living creatures “on fire,” the way we would consider a house, building or forest in flames. So when we see a giraffe, of all things, with its neck ablaze, we sit up and take notice, wide-eyed and perplexed – precisely what Dali was aiming for.

Burning Giraffe (copyright Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali) is the quintessential surrealist work by Dali, forcing us to ask what is going on, and why? And forcing us, moreover, to believe it – for Dali’s draftsmanship had an uncanny way of somehow making the unreal seem vividly real. If Dali’s nightmares became our nightmares, even for a moment, he’d succeeded in being an artist who could truly move his admirers.

When Dali inaugurated his Teatru-Museu Dali in Spain in 1974, part of the festivities included his posing with an actual stuffed giraffe, around which Dali and others held burning candles to symbolize the flames, as the Master shouted “foc!” – fire! – in Spanish!