Erwin Blumenfeld made this work the year after he emigrated from the Netherlands to France. He was then imprisoned, as a Jew and an "undesirable foreigner," in French concentration camps and shuttled for two years between Montbard, Loriol, Le Vernet, and Catus. Blumenfeld and his family eventually escaped and were reunited, fleeing to New York by way of Casablanca, Morocco, in 1941. The Dictator is a photograph of the head of a calf (which in French, has the alternate meaning of "blockhead") mounted atop a bust of Venus. It is a satirical depiction of a Fascist leader and forms the basis for Francis Picabia’s later painting The Adoration of the Calf.