Dali Planet #84: The invisible man
At the outset of World War II in 1939 Dali and Gala moved to Arcachon, a popular resort in southern France with a beach and a climate favoured by ailing Europeans. The Dalis did not stay long. He may have sympathised to some extent with the fascists, but he was constantly fleeing their advance. George Orwell criticised Dali for “scuttling off like rat as soon as France is in danger … When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near.”
In 2003 on the website Counterpunch.org, Vicente Navarro of Johns Hopkins University charged Dali with “active and belligerent support for Spain’s fascist regime” and claimed he had to leave his home in Port-Lligat “because the local people wanted to lynch him”.
That doubtless had more to do with a letter that Dali sent to the Spanish dictator Franco when it was announced that compensation would be paid to anyone who’d lost their olive trees in a particularly bad winter. The olives of Cadaques were fine, Dali pointed out, thus ruining any chance of payment to his neighbours.
Musician Costas Ferris asked Dali in the early 1970s about Franco’s Spain. “He didn’t say anything against the Spanish left-wing revolutionaries, but he said that the Communist Party was a mafia, and he hated mafias.”
It’s generally acknowledged, though, that Dali wished to remain apolitical. But on his return to Spain, Franco was waiting to greet him as a friend, as we shall see. Above is a detail from Dali’s “The Invisible Man” from 1929.
