Lee that is now slated for removal.
The high success rate of treatment at Robertson Hospital caused Tompkins’s star to rise.
Tompkins was one of many Confederate figures who neither promoted slavery nor outright decried it. (Another was Lee, who called slavery “a moral & political evil,” despite owning slaves.) In the book Captain Sally: A Biography of Capt. Sally Tompkins, America’s First Female Army Officer (2018), historian Thomas T.
(When that strategy didn’t work, Maury tried to force Brazilian leadership into accepting American colonialism in the form of trade; that also failed.) It was time for something new, local politicians thought.
Local press greeted the news enthusiastically. “Salvador Dalí may be one of the world’s greatest artists, but he’ll have to prove it if he wants to do a statue of Capt. Sally Tompkins,” a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote.
To that committee Dalí offered his own out-there concept that was in line with the artist’s predilection for Freudian weirdness and perplexing imagery drawing on art-historical tradition. His concept recast Tompkins as St. George, who, according to Christian mythology, rescued a princess from a dragon that demanded payment in the form of human flesh.
Peter Moore appeared in his place, along with the artist’s pet ocelot, Babou, and a female companion.
Locals did not take kindly to such an avant-garde vision for the monument. Dalí’s politics have never been easy to discern. He flirted with fascism—he once claimed that Hitler “turned me on”; he was friends with Wallis Simpson, a Nazi sympathizer; and he professed admiration for Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist dictator. André Breton even expelled Dalí from the Surrealist group after the artist painted The Enigma in Hitler in 1939. “For Dalí, [Surrealist activity] was inevitably an end to itself and therefore in some way inoculated against the real world,” Dawn Adès, a British art historian, once wrote.
What did it mean, then, for Dalí to conceive a Confederate monument? Was he promoting Confederate ideology, or was he making fun of it? Was this just another dream vision, or could it have signified something more?
James’s Episcopal Church.
English