What is the title of Dalí's 1940 painting of a monstrous face?

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What is the title of Dalí's 1940 painting of a monstrous face? The answer is The Face of War.

The Face of War is a 1940 oil painting by Salvador Dalí, also known as The Visage of War. It presents a withered, disembodied head floating over a barren desert. The image was created during a period shaped by the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War, making its title and imagery especially direct.

The face has an expression of terror and misery, while identical smaller faces appear inside its mouth and eye sockets. These repetitions suggest an apparently endless cycle of suffering. Serpents swarm around the head, intensifying the atmosphere of violence, death and psychological horror.

Dalí painted the work during a brief period in California, after leaving Europe as war reshaped his homeland and continent. The painting is owned by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. It is commonly confused with The Enigma of Hitler, another politically charged Dalí work, but that 1939 painting focuses specifically on Hitler and is not the monstrous-face composition described here.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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