Way back in college, a friend told me that Orwell had labeled Dali a sadist, or something to that effect – he (my friend) wasn’t more specific and I didn’t press him for details.
A year or two later, I had an English class where the professor suggested a delineation between modernist (art for art’s sake, elitist and even outright misanthropic e.g. Baudelaire, Yeats) and avant-garde (provocative, socially engaged, political: e.g. Surrealism, Mexican muralists, Situationist, punk rock). I asked the professor if he knew of the quote and what it was about; he suggested Dali be placed among the modernists and that maybe Orwell would have seen Dali on that side of the dichotomy. I’m thinking he had simply never read “Benefit of Clergy;” some years later I read about Dali’s professed support of Francoism but I’d never heard of this myself, until now.
Anyway, after that I saw Orwell as this stoic who didn’t or couldn’t enjoy anything, what with all the suffering in the world and that, by extension, he wouldn’t think anyone else could or should enjoy anything, either. Thant changed once I came across “A Nice Cup of Tea.”
EDIT:
Francisco Aranda, Bunel’s biographer:
when [The Andalusian Dog] is compared with the later and separate works of Bunuel and Dali, we see that not only the cinematographic quality, but also all the positive values of the film are those of Bunuel. Mary Meerson, of the Cinematheque Francais, who was in Paris in the thirties, has said that anything not good . . . must be attributed to Dali: some recherche images, the symbolist tendencies, an element of snobisme, the danger of avant-garde preciosity.
I quoted that here, which was originally a paper I wrote for the aformentioned English class (in case verbiage as clumsy as “thus the film techniques of two politically similar directors may be contrasted” doesn’t give it away).
See also: Art Pepper, Miles Davis…
