Dali on Hitler: Dangerous Minds : Will Howard

 

Credit: Dangerous Minds / Carl Van Vechten / Heinrich Hoffmann

Salvador Dali’s sexual obsession with Adolf Hitler

Will Howard

Sun 13 September 2026 23:00, UK

Whatever people think of Salvador Dali, from the man to his art, wasn’t left to chance.

"Dali was obsessed with his own branding. His eccentricities weren’t spontaneous acts of surrealism that his own imagination drew from the ether. Neither, really, were they good-hearted ways of spreading joy around people who needed them most. Acts like performing an entire lecture wearing a vintage diving suit or taking an anteater on a walk through the streets of Paris might have brought joy to people, and they were definitely surreal, but they were about heightening his own profile over everything else.

This was because, above all else, Dali was calculated. Doing strange things wouldn’t just get people talking about him, which would heighten the value of his art and heighten the value of him. It would also mean that whatever people said about him was on his terms. Which was important when so many people, from George Orwell to Andre Breton, were adamant that the great surrealist was a fascist.

Dali did no favours for himself here. The man spent the entire early 1930s quite simply not shutting up about his admiration for Adolf Hitler. Context is important here, though not so important that it makes his statements appropriate or understandable. On the one hand, Dali wasn’t expressing admiration for Hitler’s politics. On the other hand, he was absolutely expressing other kinds of admiration for the wannabe dictator, including several weirdly sexual statements about him.

Dali went so far as to say, “I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me… There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire; the gratuitous action par excellence that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the Surrealists.”

It’s important to note that Dali would go on to paint two other works depicting Hitler. One a typically surreal work called The Enigma of Hitler in 1939, and another, much more straightforward work called Hitler Masturbating in 1973. Dali, as he did for his whole life, would strenuously defend his right to be fascinated with fascists and to depict them in his work. Stating that he was politically neutral and that depicting them in his work was a neutral act.

The majority of the other surrealists were Marxists and thus had the sense to point out that remaining neutral in the face of a rising fascist threat is inherently fascist. They also pointed to the extremely non-neutral act of praising and congratulating Francisco Franco after he rose to power in Spain. These actions caused Breton to officially expel Dali from the Surrealist movement in 1939, a year in which it became abundantly clear that if you weren’t willing to fight against, or at least speak out against fascists, you were in league with them.

Salvador Dali may have been a great artist, but in 1939, he was still unable to outright condemn fascism, which might just say all you need to know about him. " 

I (of course!) don’t agree. I understand but vehemently disagree, They all get it wrong like Andre Breton (never the most enlightened man!) If you are at all political then I can see how this might stick in the craw but if from the arts then you will (or may) iff you understand or have studied Surrealism than you understand Dali’s stand point. Such monstrosity as Fascism was anathema and to the great man ridiculous and worthy solely of exploitation. Hence Hitler as sex object. These were as powerful a statement in my opinion as Picasso’s Guernica. Yet told differently 

In a world of ants Dali was an elephant! Such brutal monsters beneath him. The only thing for anyone studying Freud [as they all did at that time] was to understand man’s insignificant world of dreams and preposterous behaviour as killing others, slaughtering the innocents in such vast numbers was ‘beyond belief’ literally and that only made you worthy of ridicule. As John Lennon knew well the only defence is laughter and ridicule. Dali stands as one of the greatest painters to ever live and as a pater families of Surrealism it needs to be seen in that context ALL THE TIME! His attitude to religion, money, sex and drugs and politics was to ridicule it all at every given opportunity

When asked in Warhol’s Interview magazine about whether he had ever taken hallucinogens Dali promptly replied

“Dali does not take LSD. Dali IS LSD!"