The Great Avant-Garde Swindle (1)

Intro

I've seen a lot of confusion and misinformation circulating regarding Salvador Dali's opinions and his exact role within Surrealism. Of course, Dalí, being a pop-culture name, is forced to attract attention in death as he did in life. He needs no introduction. And I have to say, "Dalí was a based and redpilled fellow Catholic Falangist groyper" or "Dalí was a wholesome anti-authoritarian freethinker" aren't even the worst takes I've seen so far. In any case, I thought I might jump to the bandwagon and give my two cents on the matter.

I am going to focus on a certain aspect of his life and probably the most controversial aspect of his artistic career: his infamous 1934 divorce with Surrealism and his feud with its High Priest-Comissar André Breton.

Dalí in París

Salvador (Saviour! Saviour of the Arts!) Dalí arrived in París on the Autumn of 1929, by the hand of the ice-cold muse Gala Dmitrievna, which would forever be the artist's only source of solance and pain. Dalí, a young promise, was noticed and called upon the beating heart of the world by none other than André Breton himself. André Breton! What to say about him, except that history has been kind to him by reducing him to just "the man who created Surrealism"? Dictatorial, jealous, the Stalin of the avant-garde. Bah! Inmediately after the Dalis' installation in Paris, young Salvador began to get in contact with a peripherical figure of Surrealism, the writer Georges Bataille.

During these years, as Dalí himself would describe in his diaries, he was fundamentally a firm believer in Nietzsche's thesis. Fiercely atheistic and materialist, leaning towards unorthodox socialism, interested in a more daring and "tasteless" approach to art and revolution than the clean and appollonian Breton, whom Dalí would describe as his "father". This married perfectly with Bataille's philosophy and aesthetics, as the horridly infamous Story of the Eye can attest. (Blood! Cum! Incest! What doesn't this Story of his have!) Bataille and Breton had been feuding for some time now, and Dalí's closeness with the former might've caused the latter a certain contained rage and envy. Breton was always apalled at why these two might've chosen to portray and glorify the most disgusting and low of human nature. In this period, Bataille believes in Dalí there is a quasi-messianic hope, even comparing him to his great hero, the Marquis de Sade. Like de Sade, Dalí screams from the Bastille about inhuman atrocities and the most eschatological of tales, as to move the horrified proletariat to take the damned prison (in this case, society and good taste) by assault in wild fervour.

Another point in common with Bataille against Breton was Dali's opinion on religion. While Dalí and Breton assimilated the sacrality of the Catholic guilt and its baroque horrors and believed in a Comtean, civil, perverse religion-without-god (also known as godbuilding or simply antitheism), André Breton was more similar to a white girl who owned magick crystals and checked her horoscope twice a day while stating religion (as Feuerbach said and Marx repeated) was just the opium of the masses. Dalí even insisted and begged Breton to let him create a mysticism out of Surrealism to crown his "father" as High Priest and Prophet, which Breton denied time and time again!

This collaboration with Bataille did not last long, however. Dalí refused to directly go against his mentor, which left Bataille under the impression the Catalan was just a cowardly disappointment, and relationships cooled. Tensions mounted elsewhere, Breton published the Second Manifesto, a scathing critique of Bataille and dissident Surrealist alike, striking with the accuracy and delight of a coked-out Robespierre or a Stalinist purge. With Georges Bataille out of the picture, Dalí was more alone than ever.

Now that we have set up Dali's artistic and ideological stances, we now need to detail two crucial and concrete moments of tension between Dalí and Breton. The first occurred in 1933. Salvador, ever the rebellious child and enfant-terrible of enfant-terribles, could not leave any idol unbroken and unmocked. Not even the red idol of Vladimir Lenin, Patron Saint of Surrealism and Breton's personal guardian angel. The painting The Enigma of William Tell caused a crisis in Surrealism, as Breton simply thought that this uncouth disrespect for Lenin was reactionary and childish, a backstab of Surrealist revolutionary principles. Dalí defended himself as best as he could, but relationships were never the same.

The breaking point came when Dalí, too experimental, too contrarian, and too daring, chose to analyze Adolf Hitler as a Surrealist artist (there is no greater artist than he who paints in war, the dictator!). Breton, Socialist first and artist second, could not tolerate such niceties about the Antichrist. Hitlerian, he cried! Fascist! Reactionary! Anti-artist! German agent! Guards, guards! In New York City, just before Dalí and Breton were to meet to discuss certain new developments, Breton unilaterally expelled Dalí from Surrealism in an illegal vote and declared Dalí was a Hitlerian spy in a press conference! They never saw each other again. It all cliqued for a heartbroken Dalí. Art as a movement was dead and buried, killed by the jealous and unimaginative. All that art was good for was his own personal cruades, and, most importantly, becoming a multimillionaire. Duchamp was right! It had to be the triumph of Avida Dollars, the mocking nickname Breton bestowed upon him! So be it! So Dalí declared the very next day, "I am Surrealism"! Surrealism was dead, long live Surrealism!