Dali's Use of the Paranoiac-Critical Method and the Influence of Freudian Theory

Extract

[...] Another particularly important canvas and demonstrating the paranoiac-critical method is The the dream caused by the flight of a bee around a grenade, a second before waking up, painted in 1944. It depicts a grenade (the fruit), fish, tigers, a bayonet, an elephant and a naked woman sleeping. This painting is actually the dream itself of Gala that Dali has transfigured through his painting. Dali calls it hand-painted photograph' to bring reality and the unconscious together. The the dream caused by the flight of a bee around a grenade, a second before waking up oil on canvas The grenade is a sexed symbol of fertility and resurrection (one will think of Christ, in particular), just like the bee flying above the fruit: it is the symbol of virginity, specifically referring to the Virgin Mary.18 The bayonet has an inherent sexual aspect since it refers to the bee that stings and will sting Gala; in addition, its phallic shape inevitably refers to the idea of male sex. [...]

[...] The aesthetics of the movement, whether with fried eggs, watches, rocks or all anthropomorphic forms, allow Dali to give an image of this passage between the oral phase and the anal phase where the premises of separation appear. The works of this period are indeed symptomatic of the relationship between the soft form and the fusional temptation illustrated clearly by the theme of cannibalism,17 Lydie Pearl. This method, according to Dali, was a form of irrational understanding based on an interpretation delirium. In general, he created this method from paranoia and one of its specific aspects where the artist/paranoiac creates irrational connections between objects when no real connection exists. [...]

[...] This led him to develop the paranoiac-critical method which we have already mentioned and which we will explain in more detail in the next part. Surrealism is the little brother of Dadaism, in a way. It 'took its place' after the First World War and began its rise mainly in France. Not only artistic, surrealism was also and above all a philosophy of life that wanted to free society from consciousness and logic in order to create a utopian society. [...]

[...] (See Annex We find this idea of homosexuality in another more recent painting by Dali, Two teenagers (In 1954). This canvas represents two young naked men looking at each other, one leaning against a rock, his genitals exposed, the other standing, faceless, his genitals also exposed as well. Note that the young man leaning against the rock is well highlighted as a sexual object, just like the other young man who is deprived of his face. He becomes solely a sexual object. [...]

[...] Table of Contents Introduction 1.1 Youth 1.2 The Freudian figure: A Troubled Sexuality? 2. The Influence of Surrealism 2.1 A New Direction in Art 2.2 Automatism and the Paranoiac-Critical Method Conclusion Bibliography Annexes Annex 1 Annex 2 Introduction « My ambition, in terms of painting, is to materialize with the most imperialist rage of precision the images of concrete irrationality . which are provisionally not explainable or reducible by the systems of logical intuition or by rational mechanisms.1 Salvador Dali himself explains. [...]