Essay On Art And Illusion

Art and Illusion (1960) explains and bases Gombrich’s thesis on the process of representation and perception in art. Artists do not take off from their visual impressions, but from their ideas or concepts—all art is conceptual as artists always start from mental schemes. No image is “real” or “false,” but only appropriate to a culture and a given moment to express its meaning. Therefore, the criterion of the value of an image is not its resemblance to the model, but that it serves its intended audience.

Gombrich employs Egypt as it stands for both historical and racial apartness, for a static, stereotyped monotonous Oriental art, the “archaic” art before the Greek canons which introduced vigorous development of realistic and hyper-realistic

SALVADOR DALI AND SURREALISM

The creed of the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) postulated the primacy of the mind over matter and, in a free interpretation of Freudian theory, the expression of unconscious thought processes, with the least possible control by the ego:

Perhaps the time has come when the imagination is close to re-exercising the rights that correspond to it. [...] SURREALISM, noun, masculine. Pure psychic automatism, through which we try to express [...] the real functioning of thought. It is a dictation of thought, without the regulatory intervention of reason, oblivious to any aesthetic or moral concern. [...] Surrealism is based on the belief in the higher reality of certain forms of association disdained until the appearance of it, [in the omnipotence of the dream], and in the free exercise of

As he wrote in his Secret Life, "the growing and almighty impulse of reverie and myth began to mix so continuously and imperiously with the life of every moment, that subsequently it has often been impossible for me to know how reality begins and the imaginary ends "(Dalí, 1981/1942, pp.43). If the so-called "first surrealism" aspired to the abandonment of the defenses of the self and to yield passively to the powers of the unconscious (running with it the risk of playing with madness), the "second surrealism", thanks to Dalí and his paranoid, critical method, it would not escape from external reality, but would challenge it by offering a hyper-real alternative, whose precision would confuse the mind; a realistic style designed to dismantle reality, to "systematize confusion and contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality" (Dalí, 1930, pp.9). Salvador had learned in his childhood to teach and play to alter perception, so that he was able to project his inner images on the outside world. This habit of transforming, actively and deliberately, the appreciation of external reality by virtue of games with perception and controlled pseudo-hallucinations, crystallized in a classical technique at the service of unconscious images, in order to "materialize, with the yearning for more imperialist precision, the images of concrete irrationality.” For Dalí, the goal was that the imaginative