Images or Orwell and Dali via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Should we hold artists to the same stan­dards of human decen­cy that we expect of every­one else? Should tal­ent­ed peo­ple be exempt from ordi­nary moral­i­ty? Should artists of ques­tion­able char­ac­ter have their work con­signed to the trash along with their per­son­al rep­u­ta­tions? These ques­tions, for all their time­li­ness in the present, seemed no less thorny and com­pelling 81 years ago when George Orwell con­front­ed the strange case of Sal­vador Dali, an unde­ni­ably extra­or­di­nary tal­ent, and—Orwell writes in his 1944 essay “Ben­e­fit of Cler­gy”—a “dis­gust­ing human being.”

The judg­ment may seem over­ly harsh except that any hon­est per­son would say the same giv­en the episodes Dali describes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, which Orwell finds utter­ly revolt­ing. “If it were pos­si­ble for a book to give a phys­i­cal stink off its pages,” he writes, “this one would.” The episodes he refers to include, at six years old, Dali kick­ing his three-year-old sis­ter in the head, “as though it had been a ball,” the artist writes, then run­ning away “with a ‘deliri­ous joy’ induced by this sav­age act.” They include throw­ing a boy from a sus­pen­sion bridge, and, at 29 years old, tram­pling a young girl “until they had to tear her, bleed­ing, out of my reach.” And many more such vio­lent and dis­turb­ing descrip­tions.

Dali’s litany of cru­el­ty to humans and ani­mals con­sti­tutes what we expect in the ear­ly life of ser­i­al killers rather than famous artists. Sure­ly he is putting his read­ers on, wild­ly exag­ger­at­ing for the sake of shock val­ue, like the Mar­quis de Sade’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal fan­tasies. Orwell allows as much. Yet which of the sto­ries are true, he writes, “and which are imag­i­nary hard­ly mat­ters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” More­over, Orwell is as repulsed by Dali’s work as he is by the artist’s char­ac­ter, informed as it is by misog­y­ny, a con­fessed necrophil­ia and an obses­sion with excre­ment and rot­ting corpses.

But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughts­man of very excep­tion­al gifts. He is also, to judge by the minute­ness and the sure­ness of his draw­ings, a very hard work­er. He is an exhi­bi­tion­ist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more tal­ent than most of the peo­ple who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paint­ings. And these two sets of facts, tak­en togeth­er, raise a ques­tion which for lack of any basis of agree­ment sel­dom gets a real dis­cus­sion.

Orwell is unwill­ing to dis­miss the val­ue of Dali’s art, and dis­tances him­self from those who would do so on moral­is­tic grounds. “Such peo­ple,” he writes, are “unable to admit that what is moral­ly degrad­ed can be aes­thet­i­cal­ly right,” a “dan­ger­ous” posi­tion adopt­ed not only by con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious zealots but by fas­cists and author­i­tar­i­ans who burn books and lead cam­paigns against “degen­er­ate” art. “Their impulse is not only to crush every new tal­ent as it appears, but to cas­trate the past as well.” (“Wit­ness,” he notes, the out­cry in Amer­i­ca “against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence.”) “In an age like our own,” writes Orwell, in a par­tic­u­lar­ly jar­ring sen­tence, “when the artist is an excep­tion­al per­son, he must be allowed a cer­tain amount of irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty, just as a preg­nant woman is.”

At the very same time, Orwell argues, to ignore or excuse Dali’s amoral­i­ty is itself gross­ly irre­spon­si­ble and total­ly inex­cus­able. Orwell’s is an “under­stand­able” response, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, giv­en that he had fought fas­cism in Spain and had seen the hor­ror of war, and that Dali, in 1944, “was already flirt­ing with pro-Fran­co views.” But to ful­ly illus­trate his point, Orwell imag­ines a sce­nario with a much less con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure than Dali: “If Shake­speare returned to the earth to-mor­row, and if it were found that his favourite recre­ation was rap­ing lit­tle girls in rail­way car­riages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write anoth­er King Lear.”

Draw your own par­al­lels to more con­tem­po­rary fig­ures whose crim­i­nal, preda­to­ry, or vio­lent­ly abu­sive acts have been ignored for decades for the sake of their art, or whose work has been tossed out with the tox­ic bath­wa­ter of their behav­ior. Orwell seeks what he calls a “mid­dle posi­tion” between moral con­dem­na­tion and aes­thet­ic license—a “fas­ci­nat­ing and laud­able” crit­i­cal thread­ing of the nee­dle, Jones writes, that avoids the extremes of “con­ser­v­a­tive philistines who con­demn the avant garde, and its pro­mot­ers who indulge every­thing that some­one like Dali does and refuse to see it in a moral or polit­i­cal con­text.”

This eth­i­cal cri­tique, writes Char­lie Finch at Art­net, attacks the assump­tion in the art world that an appre­ci­a­tion of artists with Dali’s pecu­liar tastes “is auto­mat­i­cal­ly enlight­ened, pro­gres­sive.” Such an atti­tude extends from the artists them­selves to the soci­ety that nur­tures them, and that “allows us to wel­come dia­mond-mine own­ers who fund bien­nales, Gazprom bil­lion­aires who pur­chase dia­mond skulls, and real-estate moguls who dom­i­nate tem­ples of mod­ernism.” Again, you may draw your own com­par­isons.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

How the Nazis Waged War on Mod­ern Art: Inside the “Degen­er­ate Art” Exhi­bi­tion of 1937

Tol­stoy Calls Shake­speare an “Insignif­i­cant, Inartis­tic Writer”; 40 Years Lat­er, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness