Salvador Dalí’s The Enigma of Hitler is a ghostly farewell to the 1930s. Painted in the last year of the decade, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland finally brought the years of appeasement to an end, its image of a melting telephone suspended above a photograph of the Führer torn from a newspaper and lying on a plate (otherwise empty except for a few dry beans) recalls the long-distance conversations of barren diplomacy, the anxiety of hearing the latest shocking news, the dread of waiting for war.

An umbrella that could easily belong to the prime minister Neville Chamberlain hangs impotently in the ether, fading away – as colourless as the bleak landscape with which Dalí holds a mirror to his age.

The grey desolation of this image is all the more poignant because Dalí was no political activist. He was, indeed, so reluctant to take sides that he got thrown out of the surrealist movement for confessing that he dreamt about the Nazi leader. “Hitler turned me on in the highest,” he later acknowledged. Yet precisely because he reflected the dark urges of his times with such dangerous honesty, Dalí’s art presents an inner chronicle of the 30s, a secret diary of the nightmares behind the headlines.

‘Dangerous honesty’: The Enigma of Hitler by Salvador Dalí (1939). Illustration: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

No decade has ever been so lucidly portrayed by its artists. If anyone was surprised by the increasing aggression of Nazi Germany or the barbarity of the dictatorships, it was not for lack of warnings in paintings, photomontages, objects or art films such as Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), whose string of violently erotic images reveals a unhinged world.

The reason artists could so acutely expose the demonic politics of the 30s was their interest in the unconscious, which the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 had made the central interest of the avant garde.

But in the 30s, the surrealists became increasingly pessimistic and morbid. Instead of seeing the realm of dreams and desire “discovered” by Sigmund Freud as a utopia, they found it a labyrinth haunted by monsters. In Claude Cahun’s 1936 photograph of Aztec masks in a glass case at the British Museum, she contemplates these relics of human sacrifice with silent anxiety.

John Heartfield’s Picture Post cover (October 1938). Illustration: Picture Post/ heartfieldexhibition.com

The mask in the middle is made from a sacrificial victim’s skull. Would the disguise-loving Cahun put it on? If she did, would she be possessed by an ancient bloodlust? It is an eerily apposite image from the year the outbreak of the Spanish civil war inaugurated a new age of slaughter.

Some of the starkest images of the extremism that gained ground in the 1930s as democracies quailed came from German artists themselves. It took real courage for Otto Dix to paint Triumph of Death in 1934. A year after Hitler’s rise to power, this artist who had depicted the first world war and Weimar decadence with stunning honesty had already been driven out of his teaching job, and had his paintings taken down by museums. Yet he secretly painted this macabre allegory of the new Germany ruled by Death itself, starring a soldier whose uniform would soon become an image of terror for millions.

Dix sees the future – it is already clear to him that Germany is heading for genocide. How could an artist see the deathwish that statesmen such as Chamberlain refused to recognise?

Dix could not exhibit his art, but others escaped Germany to go on fighting Hitler with images. John Heartfield – as Helmut Herzfeld renamed himself in protest against German militarism – created superb satirical photomontages right through the 1930s for magazines such as Britain’s Picture Post.



One of his most vivid, from October 1938, shows two elephants taking off into the air as a comment on Chamberlain’s promise of “peace in our time” – as likely as elephants growing wings. It is a memorable image yet it also reveals why the truths artists told – even when, like Heartfield, they aimed at a mass audience – were easy to ignore. For somehow its whimsy is inadequate to the occasion. It is like a Monty Python animation or a Private Eye cover: funny stuff, but where is the sense of true nightmare as the world slid into a war of unprecedented scale and savagery?

This was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, the “age of extremes”, and anyone with a political conscience felt obliged to pick sides. Most artists were on the left. Heartfield was a communist who would end his days in East Germany, where he voluntarily returned after the second world war. The surrealist movement meanwhile argued whether it should follow Stalin or Trotsky. No wonder it had no time for the Hitler-desiring Dalí.

‘Macabre allegory’: Otto Dix’s The Triumph of Death (1934). Photograph: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

Heartfield’s satires on Hitler seem rationalist and shallow beside Dalí. They have an overconfident quality that reflects his assured belief in the victory of the working class. His vision of the Munich agreement as a deal between flying elephants simply cannot acknowledge the horror of the abyss. Marxism demanded a positive belief in the Soviet alternative. Such pitfalls of political art in the era of Hitler and Stalin help to explain why the greatest, most perceptive work of art of the 30s – not to mention the 20th century – was made by a man who up to then had seemed more interested in sex, sun and the destruction of Renaissance perspective than the urgent affairs of the day.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in a Left Bank loft in 1937, to show at that year’s International Exhibition in Paris. This global event was terrifyingly dominated by the looming totalitarian edifices of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, facing each other in chilly propagandist grandeur. Picasso painted his protest at the bombing of Guernica by Hitler’s Condor Legion to go in the much smaller, humanly scaled pavilion of the doomed Spanish republic, already losing Spain’s civil war.

‘The stuff of bare survival’: Joan Miró’s Still Life with Old Shoe (1937). Photograph: Scala

Guernica is the consummation of surrealist art. Picasso never officially joined the surrealist movement but he had been influenced by its ideas since 1924, and his art of the 30s dives into his own most troubling appetites with a daring that makes even Dalí look tame.

Picasso’s paintings of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter make his demands for libidinal gratification outrageously explicit. His depictions of bullfights return again and again to the image of a masculine bull eviscerating a feminine horse: they are confessions of a seriously violent streak.

Picasso portrays himself in the 30s as the minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth. The power of Guernica is in its truthfulness: Picasso, having dredged the darkness in his own psyche, sees it made horribly real by German bombs. The mirror of his own potential for violence releases his converse capacity for profound compassion.

No one had ever before – or has since – pictured the horrors of war with such dreamlike truth. A baby’s dead face. A burning building. Screams. Grief. We don’t see these things, we feel their reality as the images turn our guts inside out, in a series of shocking recognitions.

Guernica toured the globe, people queued to see it, but it could not save Spain or the world. In 1939 it was in New York. The misery of the 1930s could have no happy ending.

The decade is summed up with furious cynicism by Joan Miró’s hallucinatory 1937 image of an old shoe, a pitchfork, a bit of bread – the stuff of bare survival, in a world where millions would soon be denied even that.