Counting sheep is an ideological shortcut to sleep

Today I learned about two Salvador Dali paintings that I had never known about before.

Both are from 1942 when he was living in the United States after fleeing Europe.

One is “The Sheep” (the lamp is an optical illusion):

The other is a an anti-VD propaganda poster he made for the U.S. Army titled “soldier take warning” (which also has a nice optical illusion):

Whether it was effective, who knows? I doubt it would pass muster today.

From the article:

It was an age of transition, in which received values were being questioned; and Dali was subjecting it to close, intense scrutiny — the findings of which ‘were visible on his canvases as on a radar screen. Dali closed his autobiography with this statement: “And I want to be heard. I am the most representative incarnation of postwar Europe; I have lived all its adventures, all its experiments, all its dramas. As a protagonist of the Surrealist revolution I have known from day to day the slightest intellectual incidents and repercussions in the practical evolution of dialetical materialism and of the pseudo-philosophical doctrines based on the myths of blood and race of National-Socialism; I have long studied theology. And in each of the ideological short-cuts which my brain had to take so as always to be the first I have had to pay dear, with the black coin of my sweat and passion.”

I can use an ideological shortcut now and then.