The king of Surrealism, the revolutionary filmmaker, and one of the greatest businessmen of his era—these titles all righteously belong to Salvador Dali. But there are also other characteristics: domestic abuser, violent narcissist, fascist, and a terrible friend. These bold titles form the highly controversial identity of a single artist. His legacy is so complex that art curators and writers still cannot find the right solution for presenting his work correctly and respectfully to their audiences. Read on to learn more about Salvador Dali and his problematic legacy.
1. Salvador Dali Was Insufferable as a Kid
Remember the most insufferable, spoiled, egocentric, and violent kid from your neighborhood—the bully who always gets others in trouble but manages to evade punishment. Now imagine that kid becoming a world-famous artist with his face on every magazine cover.
According to his own account, Dali’s been incredibly egocentric from his early years, parading in front of poor children in a fur coat, announcing himself as their king. Aged five, he pushed a friend off a suspension bridge and sat next to the unconscious boy, calmly eating cherries, until adults noticed the incident. A year later, he kicked his three-year-old sister’s head, believing it was a ball. On an even more disturbing note, once, he found a badly injured bat and bit its head off. He could not stand rejection and threw violent tantrums on every possible occasion.
Part of Dali’s childhood eccentricities could be explained (although not excused) by his parents’ odd beliefs. The artist had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died at the age of just two and a half years, nine months before the artist’s birth. The grief-stricken parents believed his second child was none other than the reincarnation of the first one and decided to name him Salvador, too. Dali himself knew about this supposed link from his early years. Some sources attribute his obsession with death, mental instability, and fits of aggression to the identity crisis he experienced from so early on.
2. His Work Ethics Were Highly Questionable
Although there were no direct accusations of plagiarism towards Dali, the origins of some of his images remain unclear. In many of his works, he borrowed compositional or stylistic choices from other artists, mostly generations before him. Once, however, he came dangerously close to admitting direct stealing. In a conversation with the daughter of another Surrealist called Yves Tanguy, he jokingly confessed that he copied the style of painting from that of Tanguy. Indeed, the similarity between the two painters’ manners is obvious, yet Tanguy’s works predate Dali’s.
Apart from supposed free borrowing of others’ material, Dali was ready to cause harm to others if this harm had enough creative potential. The famous photograph taken by Philippe Halsman featured the artist surrounded by flying cats, chairs, and easels. It took 28 takes to get the composition right. Thus, Dali and his assistants threw three black cats into the air 28 times, flinging buckets of cold water into them. It is unknown what happened to the cats after the shot was taken, but such shock and physical trauma could be detrimental to the felines’ health.
3. He Was a Fascist Sympathizer (Allegedly)
Many art historians explored Salvador Dali’s possible Nazi ties, and most agreed that although no direct documented links were found, the famous artist was uncomfortably close to being a Nazi. In the 1930s, Dali caused a stir within the Surrealist community by exhibiting paintings with swastikas on them and publicly admitting his erotic fantasies about Hitler. Surrealists mostly had left-wing affiliations and were anti-fascists. Later, Dali excused himself by saying he was appalled by the Surrealists’ refusal to examine fascism as a phenomenon. Andre Breton, the ideological leader of the group, regarded fascism as a pathological condition and thus had no interest in dissecting it.
Whatever the roots of Dali’s fascination with Hitler were, the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent installment of the fascist regime of Francisco Franco further illustrated his political position. While Dali’s ex-friends from the Surrealist movement filmed documentaries and raised funds to help Republican Spain combat the fascists, the most famous Surrealist praised Franco as a saint and savior of Spain. When confronted about the concentration camps and executions carried out by Franco’s troops, Dali insisted the dictator was even too mild for his liking. He also had plans to invent his own religion, based on subduing all “colored” races and reestablishing human sacrifice.
4. He Was Cruel to Women
Dali’s misogyny was another infamous fact of his biography. In various periods of his time, he spoke of hating his own mother or having a phobia of female genitalia that resulted in repulsion towards all women. Some Dali experts say this phobia occurred because of Dali’s father, who filled their house with books on venereal diseases in an attempt to warn his son about the dangers of sex. The action had its effect: Dali developed at once revulsion and obsession with anything remotely sexual.
From women, he demanded praise and then hated them for it. Once, he trampled a woman who complimented the beauty of his feet. The fit of aggression, as he later explained, was caused by the obvious nature of the compliment. Even Dali’s chosen muse and manager, his wife of fifty-three years, and a person of similarly insufferable character, Gala, was not exempt from his violent tendencies. Yes, he painted her portraits and built her a castle, but he also broke and fractured several of her bones. In turn, she fed him inadequate amounts of drugs and convinced him to flood the art market with countless Dali forgeries. As a gesture of dominance and, likely, concern for her safety, Gala demanded that Dali visit her only when she sent him a hand-written permission.
5. He Almost Ruined His Ex-Best Friend’s Life
One of the most important relationships in Salvador Dali’s life was his friendship with Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and film director Luis Buñuel. Together with Dali, Buñuel would create the iconic Surrealist films An Andalusian Dog and The Golden Age, notorious for their shocking scenes of sex and mutilation. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Dali was already famous enough to settle comfortably in the United States. His friends were not as lucky: Lorca was murdered by the fascist militia, and Buñuel had to flee with his entire family, inventing ways to survive on the go.
After an exhausting trip to the US, Buñuel was lucky enough to find a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The famed director was broke, so he made the tragic mistake of asking Dali for a loan of $50, promising to pay them back after the first salary. Dali’s response? “You don’t lend money to friends – and by the way, thank goodness Franco won the war.” If this were not painful enough for Buñuel, soon Dali would get him fired from MoMA by exposing his ex-best friend as an atheist. If at first, Dali’s flirtations with fascist doctrines could have seemed to be a weird conceptualist exploration, the tone changed after he began causing direct damage to those around him.
In his later writings, Dali called Lorca’s terrible death a result of revolutionary confusion rather than part of a mass-murderous campaign. Even the fact that his own sister had been tortured by Franco’s troops did not stop Dali from meeting the dictator in 1948. During his visit to Spain, he praised Franco’s wisdom and decisiveness. Even though Dali’s films and writings were banned under the fascist regime, he nonetheless even presented Franco with a portrait of his granddaughter. Dali went on to publicly claim Franco a saint despite tens of thousands of Spaniards murdered under his rule. Despite the artist’s obvious disconnection from the regime’s conservative norms, the world-famous artist was a valuable asset for Franco. Still, Dali’s supposed attempts to publicly legitimize Franco’s rule did not help to sustain it after the dictator’s death but smeared the artist’s posthumous legacy.
How Should We Talk About Salvador Dali?
No one ever made any secret about the unpleasant aspects of Dali’s biography. Dali himself was pretty open about it or even too open, publishing an autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. Some Dali admirers insisted the artist was an unreliable narrator known for his eccentric character; thus, the legends from The Secret Life could be nothing more than his fantasies. Still, in this case, for some unknown reason, Dali decided to make these fantasies public, clearly knowing what the reaction would be.
The recurring issue of artist’s responsibility for their creation seems to have no solution. Yet, in the case of Dali and some other famous artists, problematic behavior created a certain stereotype that is too hard to weed out. For many years, the violent alcoholism of Jackson Pollock was written off as a side effect of his genius. Picasso’s abuse was dispersed under the weight of his creative innovation. With Dali, his obvious mental instability and a shocking lack of responsibility became prerequisites for his undoubtedly great art.
Fortunately or not, the long list of Dali’s repulsive actions does not make his work less revolutionary or influential. Still, perhaps it is time to dispel the myth of artistic talent as a license to hurt others. Turning others’ lives into a living hell would not make one a better artist—but empathy and attention sometimes could.
