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Coeur Sacré de Jésus
It’s probably not a particularly profitable exercise to judge artists’ work by the peculiarities of their private lives, though in the case of Salvador Dalí, whose Cœur Sacré de Jésus is reproduced here, such an exercise makes fascinating reading. But what about their response to the public political and social issues of the day? Is it as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Leo the Lion would have it “ars gratia artis,” or is there more to it than that? When Hitler came to power Dalí publicly praised the Nazi regime, and he supported the Francisco Franco (1892–1975) dictatorship until the end. While Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painted Guernica (1937), Dalí painted The Enigma of Hitler (1939). (Is it fair to ask, after Kristallnacht, what was the enigma?) Of course, there were other giants of the 20th century who were to one degree or another infected by Nazi mythology. Martin Heidegger (1889–1975), whose Being and Nothingness is one of the 2oth century most influential texts, and who despite his apologists and his own effort to cover-up and rewrite his record, was unrepentant to the end in his adherence to Nazi ideology. Ezra Pound, who in his virulent World War II broadcasts from Pisa went so far as to entertain a pogrom against “top” Jews, and whose magnificent Cantos is marred by numerous anti-Semitic passages. Nobelist Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norway’s greatest novelist, who embraced the Nazi imposed Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945) regime, met with both Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), and also was unrepentant to the end; Ernest Hemingway (1891–1961) and his The Sun Also Rises’ unfortunate portrayal of Robert Cohn, but whose anti-Semitism, according to one critic, was “only skin deep”; the self-described “hebrophobe,” D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), whose standard biographer concludes Lawrence wasn’t anti-Semitic because “one of his closest lifelong friends was a Jew”; and finally T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), who lectured “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” It was Pound who proclaimed “artists are the antennae of the race” (though there is a question if he meant human race). If so, how is it that these artists who created some of the last century’s most profound poetry, paintings, novels, and philosophy went haywire in response to one of the greatest moral crises Western Civilization has ever faced? The question remains whether a man’s artistic achievement should be separated from his morality and ideology? Dalí, who professed to being a devoted Catholic,
painted a second Sacred Heart entitled Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure
on the Portrait of My Mother. |
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