[lbo-talk] Dali's trial

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 11 12:16:17 PDT 2009


I think it was mostly that Dali's surrealism extended into the moral realm (both sexually and otherwise). Such as his famous burning of the bread (which was later, however, IIRC).

--- On Thu, 6/11/09, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:


> From: Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Dali's trial
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, June 11, 2009, 3:02 PM
> An interesting Dali site with lots of
> background.  This post, much longer than what I've
> clipped here,  includes an image of the painting that
> so bothered Breton.  Looks like Breton's fear of cock
> might have been the real trigger to throw Dali out:
>
>
> [...]
>
> [Breton] had seen Dali’s arrival in Paris six years
> earlier as just what the surrealists needed. They were by
> then already running dry of ideas. But Breton and Louis
> Aragon saw themselves as sophisticates in charge of a motley
> amalgam of foreign buffoons, including the original
> “Andalusian dogs”, Dali and Luis Bunuel. Dali in
> particular oozed warped pathologies, and his surrealism,
> it’s been noted, “was dangerously total”.
>
> “The Enigma of William Tell” so infuriated Breton that
> on February 2 he’d sought to destroy it at the Exposition
> du Cinquantenaire in the Salon des Indépendants at the
> Grand Palais, a show the other surrealists boycotted, but it
> was hung beyond his reach.
>
> Dali challenged Breton to convene the group for an
> emergency meeting “at which the mystique of Hitler shall
> be debated”, and Breton scheduled the duel for four days
> later.
>
> Dali showed up with a thermometer in his mouth, claiming he
> felt ill, and while Breton reeled off his accusations, Dali
> kept checking his temperature.
>
> When it was his turn to present his case, he began to
> remove his clothing piece by piece, while reciting a
> prepared speech in which he explained that his obsession
> with Hitler was at heart apolitical, and that he could not
> be a Nazi “because if Hitler were ever to conquer Europe,
> he would do away with hysterics of my kind, as had already
> happened in Germany”.
>
> [...]
>
>
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