OIt was already known that the famous Catalan painter Salvador Dali, who died in 1989, had had strong sympathies for dictatorial regimes, starting with that of General Franco, in power for four decades in Spain. It was also known that the man with the fanciful mustache felt a certain weakness for Hitler and Mussolini. But we did not know that the painter from Cadaqués nurtured the insistent hope of creating a new atheistic, hateful and clearly supremacist religion. Indeed, an unpublished letter sent to the father of surrealism André Breton – a movement to which Salvador Dali belonged –, recently made public, reveals the painter’s crazy project. In this missive, revealed by El Paíshe expresses his desire to found a religion “at the same time sadistic, masochistic, dreamlike and paranoid”.
And to specify: “An essentially anti-Christian and materialist faith, based on the progress of science, in other words without god and scientific. This letter dates from 1935, when the Führer and the Duce were respectively in power in Germany and Italy, the artist does not hide the deep admiration he felt for the two men. The news had the effect of a cold shower in a country which has made him one of its cultural icons and where the museum dedicated to his work in Figueres, in Catalonia, is an essential place, as well as the Miro museum. from Barcelona.
We do not want the happiness of all men, but that of some at the expense of others.
A year earlier, in 1934, the surrealists led by André Breton had asked Salvador Dali to temporarily distance himself from the movement, given his extremist positions. This was not to deter the painter who gave free rein to his delusions of grandeur and his fascination with the most brutal power. He then said to be inspired by the theories of Freud and Lacan supposed to bring out the desires that Christian morality would repress and keep hidden in the unconscious. From there, he convinced himself that it was necessary to go beyond Christianity and, hypnotized by the figure of Adolf Hitler, he did not hesitate to propose in his letter “the end of the scandalous inflation of Christian altruism”: ” We do not want the happiness of all men, but that of some to the detriment of others, because oppression […] is the primordial psychological, biological and physical condition for remnant bliss. »
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Salvador Dali exalts the phenomena that endanger intellectual certainties, and he is then convinced that Nazism is the most brilliant example. To the point of depicting National Socialism as surrealism in power, and as “the anarchic amalgamation of all revolutionary ideologies”. In 1935, the very year in which Hitler had the racist Nuremberg laws approved, the painter sank into an anti-humanist cruelty that made him wish for the enslavement of “all colored races” by white people, a source of “tremendous possibilities for ‘immediate enthusiasm’. We understand that the surrealists considered the ideas of the Catalan painter nauseous, who was definitively expelled from the movement in 1939.