Dali and Fascism

The Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy took place under the dominion of the conservative forces that controlled the apparatus of the fascist state from1939 – 1978.  The leadership of the democratic forces had just come out of jail or returned to Spain from exile and could not match the enormous powers that the ultra-right had in the political institutions and in the media where their control was almost absolute.  The workers’ mobilization against the dictatorship had been instrumental in ending that dictatorship.  From 1974 to 1976, Spain saw the largest number of strikes that existed in Europe, strikes aimed at ending the dictatorship.  Franco died in bed but the dictatorship ended in the streets, with workers’ mobilizations.  That popular pressure was able to modify but not break, however, the apparatus of the dictatorial state.

The enormous power of the ultra-conservatives forces and the weakness of the political leadership of the left-leaning democratic movement prevented the establishment of a full democracy and, as a consequence, those conservative forces maintained an enormous influence in the political and cultural lives of Spain.  That explains the difficulties that the progressive forces in Spain have had in correcting the official history promoted by the post-Francoist conservative forces in the country.

One example of this inability to change the “official” history is how Dali is presented to the public.  There is a whole industry aimed at promoting his paintings and his life.  And Dali is a major figure celebrated in Spain.  Recently, the major opera house of Barcelona – el Liceu – showed an opera dedicated to Dali.  And Cadaques, one of the places on the Mediterranean Catalan coast where the Catalan bourgeoisie spends their vacations, has a monument in the major square of the town with his figure.

Dali was, however, a person with clear fascist positions.   The media has kept a complicit silence about it.  On the rare occasions that politics appear in the official biography of Dali, his support for the dictatorship is explained as his intent to be on good terms with the­­­­­­­­­­­­­ apparatus of that state in order to avoid paying taxes, a perception usually held in Catalonia and Spain, where tax fraud has always been a general practice among the wealthy.  This collaboration with the dictatorship is trivialized because in the community of the rich (among which Dali was a prominent figure)

everyone practiced tax fraud.  Except for this piece of information which usually appeared as a footnote, nothing is said about Dali’s heavy involvement with fascism.  This is how the dominance of conservative forces appears in the shaping of perception in the art world.  The equivalent of this situation in the United States would be if Washington’s Kennedy Center...