He subsequently claimed that he was aware the war was going to occur long before it began, and cited his work as evidence of "the prophetic power of his subconscious mind."

[1][2] The art historian Robert Hughes commented on Dalí's painting in his biography of Goya, stating: "Salvador Dalí appropriated the horizontal thigh of Goya's crouching Saturn for the hybrid monster in the painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, ... which—rather than Picasso's Guernica—is the finest single work of visual art inspired by the Spanish Civil War.

[4] Dalí and his wife, Gala, were trapped in the middle of a general strike and an armed uprising by Catalan separatists in Catalonia in 1934, an incident which may have influenced his Spanish Civil War motif.

His sister was tortured and imprisoned by communist soldiers fighting for the Republic and his good friend from art school, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, was murdered by a fascist firing squad.

Dalí is quoted as saying the reason he included boiled beans was "one could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without the presence of some mealy and melancholy vegetable.