Coderman, sorry, Dali was allegedly an admirer of Hitler. Later, when the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, ruled Spain, despite his ruthlessness towards the common man, Dali maintained affable relations with him. Dali constantly affirmed his apolitical stance but his paintings and actions did not match with his statements.
George Orwell wrote an essay on him and ruminated on a question and called Dali “a disgusting human being” In 1975, when General Franco executed many people, hundreds and thousands of fascists gathered in support of Franco, chanting his name and making fascists salutes. When the whole world condemned this appalling act, Dali praised Franco and made him the “greatest hero of Spain.” Over and over again, following high-profile rape scandals and domestic abuse, intellectual thievery and explicit racism, people have asked, hesitant yet hopeful, if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. The subtext of this question, usually outwardly expressed as a kind of philosophical fluffing, is: Can we please just purely enjoy our favorite catchy songs, cool-looking paintings, and well-written sentences without having to think about the suffering their creators engendered? With Dalí—an openly obnoxious man who willfully claimed necrophilia, cruelty to animals and people, fascism, self-obsession, and greed—to do this seems particularly egregious. When Dalí collaborated with Philippe Halsman (who also made a book about Dalí's mustache) to make the iconic Dalí Atomicus photo, the process required 28 attempts, which would have been fine except for the fact that each of those attempts involved throwing three cats into the air and flinging buckets of water at them. I hope Coderman's happy now.
