Art: Strictly Paranoiac

On his favorite subject—himself—Salvador Dali writes at least as vividly as he paints. In the French monthly La Table Ronde, Dali adds to the autobiographical score by giving his own account of why he was booted out of the “official” surrealist group in the early ’40s.

“I was too surrealistic,” says Dali. One of his paintings, he recalls, showed Lenin with a buttock three meters long, propped up by a crutch. Dali had hoped to shock and impress his fellow surrealists, but they were bored. Dali then turned his artistic attention to Adolf Hitler:

“I was obsessed to the point of delirium with the personality of Hitler, which always came to me as a woman . . . The softness of that Hitlerian flesh under his military tunic created in me a state of gustatory, milky, nutritious, Wagnerian ecstasy, which made my heart beat violently.” This vision had nothing to do with politics, says Dali, but he soon found himself defending his position at a meeting of French surrealists.

“The meeting . . . was memorable.” Dali spent most of the session on his knees, he says, “not pleading against expulsion but exhorting [them] to understand that my obsession with Hitler was strictly paranoiac and apolitical.”

The surrealists just didn’t understand. Says Dali: “Someone like me, who pretended to be a true madman, living and organized . . . was not allowed to exist.” He was drummed out of the surrealist circle.

His Hitler obsession, he adds, lasted until the Führer’s death. He happened to be taking his temperature when the news came. For exactly 17 minutes he lay there thinking, thermometer in mouth. When he rose, his temperature was fine; both Hitler and surrealism were dead phases, and Dali formulated his new line: “I believe that I am the savior of modern art, the only one capable of sublimating, integrating and rationalizing all the revolutionary experiences of modern times in the great classical tradition of realism and mysticism, which is the supreme and glorious mission of Spain.”