Surrealism, Politics and Culture by Raymond Spiteri Donald Lacoss

Author:Raymond Spiteri, Donald Lacoss [Raymond Spiteri, Donald Lacoss]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, European, Literary Criticism, Reference
ISBN: 9780754609896
Google: kFRQAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2003-01-15T03:50:23+00:00

Fascism, Socialist Realism and Paranoia in the 1930s

In several articles and announcements for his future book-length publication on The Angelus, Dalí simultaneously defended his ‘paranoiac’ fascination with Hitler and his ongoing investigations into Millet.48 Paintings like The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition (1934), accompanied by his inflammatory declarations on Hitler, drew the scrutiny of his fellow Surrealists, but Dalí’s work on Millet went virtually unnoticed. In 1934 when Breton wrote to Dalí about his inappropriate obsessions, Dalí responded with a multi-page letter in which he defended himself against Breton’s accusations.49 In his last autobiography, The Unspeakable Confessions, Dalí continued to claim that ‘political or moral criteria […] did not signify in relation to [his] paranoia-critical concepts’,50 despite the fact that his lectures at the time demonstrate a critical knowledge of the workings of what Dalí called ‘itlerisme’ and its importance as a mass movement.51 Thus, Dalí’s understanding of his obsession with totalitarianism was quite different from that of his peers. He understood his paranoiac-critical method to be the tool with which the irrational could be analyzed, or as he explained in his Diary of a Genius: ‘Dalí, the absolute rationalist, wanted to know all about the irrational […] to reduce and submit this irrational whose conquest he was making’.52

48 J[ust] C[abot], ‘Una estona amb Dalf, Mirador, no. 297 (18 October 1934); Salvador Dalí, The Conquest of the Irrational, p. 18; and Salvador Dalí, ‘The Angelus of Millet’, The New Hope 11:4 (August 1934), pp. 10ff.

49 Ian Gibson provides a summary of these events in the Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, pp. 375–80. For a thorough reading of Dalí’s engagement with fascism in relation to his paranoiac-critical method and the writings of Jacques Lacan, see Robin Adèle Greeley, ‘Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia’, Art History 24:4 (September 2001) 465–92.

50 Dalí, Unspeakable Confessions, p. 112.

51 Ibid., p. 112. Fèlix Fanès has published the manuscript of Dalí’s talk in 1934 in Barcelona, ‘Per un tribunal terrorista de responsabilitats intelectuals’, in which the painter details his work on The Angelus and addresses his theories about Hitler. This is a critical document for understanding Dalí’s theoretical position at the time. Fanés, Salvador Dalí, pp. 255–60.

52 Dalí, Diary of a Genius, p. 17.

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