Comparison and Contrast

1 THE ARTISTIC STYLES OF PABLO PICASSO AND SALVADOR DALI The artistic styles of Pablo Picasso, best known for his high abstractions of the Cubist painting style, and Salvador Dali, one of the most important leaders of the Surrealist movement, have influenced a wide range of artists and are today considered as the quintessential examples of twentieth century art. Picasso as an artist was highly imaginative and original and borrowed heavily from many historical examples which aided him in developing new painting styles.

Salvador Dali, like many of his Surrealist contemporaries, sought inspiration from a love for fantasy and studied the writings of Sigmund Freud regarding the human subconscious mind which inspired him to "systemize confusion" through his paintings. The Cubism style of painting as practiced by Pablo Picasso is best represented by his Accordionist (1911, oil on canvas), a construction of large intersecting planes that suggest the forms of a man with his instrument.

Host of smaller shapes, each a simplification of some aspects of the original subject, hover in and interpenetrate the larger planes. The total effect is that of a new kind of pictorial reality. The viewer is no longer obligated to contemplate merely a man playing an accordion, but is allowed to explore the canvas and probe its myriad of objects that have been disintegrated and then reintegrated which offers a great variety of views from many different angles and tangents.

Picasso's experiments with painting worked still more radical change in what could be called pictorial reality. In his Still-life With Chair-caning (1911-12, oil and pasted paper), Picasso combines an oilcloth replica of a caned chair seat with elements recovered 2 from disintegrations of pictorial form such as shown in his Accordionist. This painting produces a startling confrontation or juxtaposition of a commonplace, manufactured surface with painted abstract shapes.

The composition not only introduces violent contrasts of texture but presupposes the painting surface to be in itself an object given touch as well as sight-a plane surface upon which materials other than paint have been placed. This texturing of the surface is new and asserts the painting to be not a picture but a flat area that can receive almost any kind of application of apparently unrelated substances. This form of pictorial art so representative of Picasso's style takes a step toward becoming a relief sculpture.

Picasso's experiments with this new medium marked the end of the first phase of Cubism. In contrast to the style of Picasso, that of Salvador Dali is surrealistic or dependent on dream imagery. Dali utilized multiple images of multiple symbolic meaning to suggest evocations from his subconscious. He also developed a fundamental Surrealist method, the juxtaposition of seemingly irrelevant and certainly unrelated objects in unexpected situations. This method was suggested to Dali by a metaphor originating from one of his spiritual predecessors, the somewhat ephemeral French poet Isadore Ducasse.

These aspects of his painting style can best be seen in perhaps the most familiar of his works, the Persistence of Memory (1931, oil on canvas). With this work, Dali created the most haunting allegory of empty space in which time is at an end. The barren landscape, without horizon, drifts to infinity, lit by some eerie never setting sun. An amorphous creature sleeps in the foreground, draped with a limp watch.

Another such watch hangs from the branch of a dead tree, and yet another hangs half over the edge of 3 a rectangular form. The watches are visited by ants and a fly as if they were decaying organic life, soft and viscous. This painting is the impact of contradiction at its sharpest-the watch is metamorphosed into an object devourable by bust ants. This impossible landscape and its impossible contents are perfectly recognizable as being part of the dream world.

Thus, Dali, as the ultimate Surrealist painter, presented images to the viewer so private that communication with an audience of any appreciable size became difficult if not impossible except when Dali, through his choice of symbols, described experiences common to ordinary persons. His dream imagery is, out of all forms of non-conscious experience, the most common and the most vivid, but his presentational style required more than a mere mastery of pure abstract design.

In my own personal opinion, I much prefer the painting style of Salvador Dali, due to his.