Who expelled Dalí from the Surrealist movement?

André Breton expelled Salvador Dalí from the Surrealist movement.

Breton was the leading organizer and theorist of the Paris-based Surrealist group, so his announcement of Dalí’s expulsion carried exceptional weight. Dalí had joined the group in 1929 and quickly became one of its most celebrated painters, using his precise technique and “paranoiac-critical method” to generate disturbing, dreamlike images. His increasingly public political positions and controversial statements, however, deepened the conflict with fellow Surrealists.

After Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Dalí praised Catholicism and the Falange and refused to condemn fascism in the way Breton and many other Surrealists expected. In the May issue of the magazine Minotaure, Breton announced Dalí’s expulsion, accusing him of endorsing race war and of turning away from Surrealist automatism. Dalí had narrowly avoided expulsion during an earlier 1934 “trial” within the group.

The episode did not erase Dalí’s importance to Surrealism. He remained one of the movement’s defining visual artists, even as Breton later mocked his commercialism with the nickname “Avida Dollars,” an anagram of Salvador Dalí.