The Elephants

Two elephants stride across a barren plain on absurdly long, fragile, stilt-like insect legs, bearing tall obelisks on their backs against a glowing twilight sky. Salvador Dali plays weight against weightlessness - the massive beasts and monuments perched on legs that seem too spindly to bear them, a dreamlike image of grandeur and instability. Now in a private collection, the Elephants is among his most iconic motifs, the impossibly elongated legs lending the heavy animals an eerie, floating quality, monumentality and fragility fused into a single haunting, oft-reproduced vision of the Surrealist imagination.