Visual arts overview and contemporary practices

Visual Arts

Salvador Dali - Surrealism

The artists of the Surrealist movement researched and studied the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, determined to explore ways in which to express their art through the world of dreams and the unconscious. Some expressed their art in the abstract tradition, others, in the symbolic tradition. Although, surrealism and certain forms of abstract art share similar origins, they diverge on interpretation of what those origins mean to the aesthetic of art (History pg). The accumulation of knowledge is the root, the basis, to push beyond the frontiers into the unknown. Dali was one artist whose approach to art during the Twentieth Century used that accumulated knowledge, built upon it and mastered it (History pg).

Dali explored all the science of painting and used this as a way to study the psyche through subconscious images. He named this process the 'paranoiac critical method.' This process allowed images to reach the conscience and then freeze them on canvas, giving the consciousness an opportunity to comprehend their meaning. He further expanded this process into the 'oniric-critical method', paying attention to his dreams and then freezing them through his art for analysis (History pg). He said his aim in painting was 'to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialistic fury of precision....in order that the world of imagination and the concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident....as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality" (Tansey 1076).

Dali's process was the method of envisioning and then painting with superb microscopic precision the delusions of a madman without becoming one himself. By embracing Freud, and then Parisian Surrealism, he integrated these factors into a unique style of Dalinian Super-realism, which combined the most realistic autochthonous glimpses of subjects with vivid hallucinatory images (Morse 9). The age of science had a great impact on Dali's work, maturing his Freudian Super-realism. "Who else but Dali could have conceived a method of photographing the substance of thought through the nerve ending in the human eye" (Morse 11). He was inspired by the discovery of the spiraled nucleus of deoxyribonucleic acid, using this in his art to reflect the conflict of extreme realism with the tenets of religion (Morse 11).

Most people associate Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso in the same breath. Although both are regarded as surrealist artists, Picasso approached this art form by rejecting the schooled craft to become primitive. He believed the basis of art was the ingenuity of childhood, the less preoccupied an artist was with his craft the better his art. However, Dali believed that the ingenuity of childhood meant having an open mind and nurturing throughout one's life the excitement and curiosity of a child, not painting like one (History pg).

Dali believed that Surrealism operated on the plane of reality itself, liberating the consciousness by releasing thought and desire through acts of moral and aesthetic subversion. Moreover, Dali separated imagination from inspiration, saying, "Imagination is something which is put together in a more or less inspired way...is the spout whose force obeys our will....inspiration is something involuntary, like the geyser which bursts forth unexpectedly...raising its salty and boiling jet to unexpected heights of passion" (Lubar 12).

In the words of Donald Kuspit, a new art "must first show that it has democratic appeal...to those generally unschooled in art or not professionally interested in it. Then it must suffer a period of aristocratic rejection by those schooled in an accepted and... traditional form of art...those with vested interest in a known art and concerned with protecting it at all costs" (History pg). Such was the career of Salvador Dali, to establish a new art form, expressing more than mere feelings and realistic images on canvas. In 1944, Jackson Pollock expressed, "...how little contemporary action artists really understood the creative, intellectual explorations that Dali undertook to create 'something new'" (Lubar 8).