Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: A Double Take

Rather than a lecture, A Double Take is a half-hour conversation in front of a single canvas: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), which Dalí painted in Paris in 1936, months before Spain tore itself apart. On loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and installed in the James Family Wing, the picture shows a contorted body wrenching at its own limbs. A facilitator uses Visual Thinking Strategies, a method in which participants say what they notice, point to the evidence and weigh one another's readings. The group then breaks off for quiet, solitary looking. No art history background is needed, though a gallery admission ticket is.