This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1934 the Surrealist movement put one of its own on trial. Andre Breton, who had founded the group a decade earlier with his Surrealist Manifesto and who guarded its membership like a doctrine, convened a mock tribunal to formally expel Salvador Dali, the ostensible charge an ambiguous painting involving Lenin, the real grievance broader: Dali's refusal to explicitly denounce fascism as Europe drifted toward war, and his increasingly open embrace of paid commercial work, magazine covers, advertising, jewelry design, conduct Breton mocked with an anagram of Dali's own name suggesting naked greed. To Breton, Surrealism was never simply a style; it was a political project, entangled with currents of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and a member who would not hold the political line, however brilliant his paintings, had put himself outside the movement he claimed to represent. Dali's response was characteristically theatrical and entirely unrepentant: he showed up to his own expulsion hearing wearing several sweaters and carrying a thermometer, and delivered a speech insisting that he alone was the true Surrealist, the others merely doctrinaire. History has, in its way, sided with him more than with Breton's intentions. Dali continued to call himself a Surrealist for the rest of his life regardless of the group's formal ruling, and his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, its watches melting over a barren shoreline, remains today the single image most museum visitors summon first when they hear the word Surrealism, ahead of any painting by an artist who stayed in Breton's good graces. The 1934 trial is a case study in a recurring tension inside twentieth-century avant-garde movements: between political purism, which polices membership by conviction, and the individual genius the movement was organized around in the first place, who may hold no consistent politics at all.