“You have certainly already heard of this man. But did you know that he was a fan of a certain mustachioed gentleman, very famous in 39-45?” The tone is playful, the subject much less. On this TikTok signed Marie Guerineau (75,000 subscribers on the platform), the face of Salvador Dali is displayed. After a brief presentation of the surrealist, the young videographer comes to the heart of the matter: the assumed and often publicized fascination of the painter for Adolf Hitler.
If at the time Dali made no secret of his sympathy for the dictator (whom he sometimes represented in some of his paintings), this memory did not reach the new generation. On the “Gen Z” social network, more and more French-speaking and English-speaking videographers are discovering and criticizing the master’s legacy, underlines Les Inrocks .
For the younger generation, explains the magazine, the artist has long been considered a kind of banner of kitsch. Beyond their history and their context, his paintings are best known through the many derived objects. More recently, Dali was the subject of an immersive exhibition at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris. While his works were projected on the walls of this digital museum, the establishment broadcast titles of Pink Floyd. Like in a nightclub. So many ways to popularize the surrealist, whose history is rediscovered today with bitterness.
Salvador Dali is thus accused of fascism – his claimed taste for the person of Adolf Hitler -, of sadism (in 1948, he threw cats in the air twenty times for the purposes of a photograph), of necrophilia and of sexism. The videos, always documented by press articles, dwell on biographical elements of the painter. Until a letter sent to André Breton in 1935, in which the painter describes Hitler’s National Socialism as a seizure of power by his movement, surrealism.
“This is an account that hates Salvador Dali. He was a fascist, Nazi sympathizer, he abused animals, beat women and was narcissistic to death. I can’t look at his work without thinking of all the horrible things he has do and the way he painted Hitler… (…)”, writes Hanna, a tiktoker passionate about art, in the description of a video where she is asked to create a pair of earrings inspired by works by the artist.
So many reactions that invite us to question the painter’s heritage. And which recall the many criticisms of another Spanish master, the painter Pablo Picasso, today decried by a section of the art world for the violence he exerted on women.
