Salvador Dalí

Limp cranes and cranian harp, composed as an accumulation of sketches, juxtaposes an array of Dali's quintessential motifs—soft watches, mutating shoes, the stretched harp, and deformed skulls referred to in the title. The harp and skull were, for Dali, evocative of melancholy and death. He claimed that his obsession with skull imagery was rooted in a childhood memory of encountering an individual with encephalitis whose skull had been deformed by disease.