Sunday, February 20, 2011

Two Masters, Two Opposing Approaches

Two Masters, Two Opposing Approaches to Art
Every profession has its own history in which the accumulation of knowledge is the basis to push the frontiers into the unknown. Dali and Picasso are two masters who stand at the vanguard of two opposite approaches to art in the Twentieth Century: To use that accumulated knowledge and build upon it, or to discard it.
Dali embraced all the science of painting as a way to study the psyche through subconscious images. He called this process the Paranoiac Critical Method. As any paranoiac, the artist should allow these images to reach the conscience, and then do what the paranoiac cannot do: Freeze them on canvas to give consciousness the opportunity to comprehend their meaning. Later on, he expanded the process into the Oniric-Critical Method, in which the artist pays attention to his dreams, freezing them through art, and analyzing them as well. As Freud said, "A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened."
Picasso took the opposite approach to art. He inherited the gusto for ugliness, scandal and chaos of the Dada movement and the automatic surrealists. Picasso rejected the craft to become "primitive," deciding that the ingenuity of childhood is the basis of art. To him this meant that the less the artist is preoccupied with his craft the better his art. To Dali, however, the "ingenuity of childhood" meant keeping an open mind and maintaining the curiosity and excitement of the child throughout one's life, not painting as a child.

(c) Monica Sanchez

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