Dali's enigma, Picasso's protest: the most important artworks of the 1930s

For surrealists, modernists and montagists alike, it was a labyrinth of monsters and physical horrors: no decade has ever been so lucidly portrayed by its artists

What the Great Depression reveals about our future

Salvador Dalí’s The Enigma of Hitler is a ghostly farewell to the 1930s. Painted in the last year of the decade, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland finally brought the years of appeasement to an end, its image of a melting telephone suspended above a photograph of the Führer torn from a newspaper and lying on a plate (otherwise empty except for a few dry beans) recalls the long-distance conversations of barren diplomacy, the anxiety of hearing the latest shocking news, the dread of waiting for war.

An umbrella that could easily belong to the prime minister Neville Chamberlain hangs impotently in the ether, fading away – as colourless as the bleak landscape with which Dalí holds a mirror to his age.

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