The Poetry of America, 1943 by Salvador Dali

This large picture was painted in a bedroom of the Del Monte Lodge in Monterey, California. Here the Dalinian doctrine has been successfully applied to transcribe the obsessive images, fruit of the years of exile Dali and Gala spent in America during World War II. American dynamism is represented by the two principal figures, football players, and by the little character posed on the appendage in the back of the one on the left; he is balancing a ball on his finger and symbolizes the physical vitality of Negroes. In this work Dali has expressed his premonition of the difficulties which would arise between the black and white citizens after the war by painting a soft map of Africa hanging from the clock in the back.

As far as Dali is concerned, the Coca-Cola bottle is also premonitory. Dali had painted the bottle with photographic meticulousness nearly twenty years before Andy Warhol and the American Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns started to do the same thing. They were surprised to see this canvas by the Catalonian painter dated 1943 when they thought themselves to be the first ones to show an interest in this sort of anonymous and banal object.