Unit Calendar

Unit Title/Topic Art in the Spanish World                                    Course             Spanish I                                                                       

Teacher             Ms. Olson                                                              Grade Level             7th                                                                                   

Assessment Plan:

1. Informal Assessments: Worksheets, participation, group work, written paragraphs

1. Unit Assessments: Vocabulary Quiz, Final Project

Unit Project:

1. Student Learning Objective/s:

Students will create an original piece of art. Students will write a formal description of their artwork to describe it to others. Students will create a museum exhibit of their art that parents will be invited to view. Students will model their work after either Picasso, Dalí, or Kahlo.

1. Possible Topics and Resources: Students may create anything that is visual. It may be a painting, sculpture, collage, etc. Students may use materials found in the classroom, or they may use materials from home. Students should model their art after one of the artists being studied and explain in their description what the connection is.

1. Grading Rubric

It is a fact that education is a prime tool one has to gain in order to attain success. However, some individuals achieved success, fame and popularity in their chosen field of endeavors purely by sheer perseverance, will and a little bit of luck. Read on to know seven of these distinguish personalities. 

7. Cary Grant

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Cary Grant (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986) born Archibald Alexander Leach, was a popular stage and film actor during the 30’s. Having starred in 72 films, Cary Grant captured the hearts of many by his charismatic and handsome look. But did you know that for his girls’ toilet escapade, he was kicked out  from Fairfield Grammar School.   

6. Mary Leakey

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Mary Leakey (February 6, 1913 – December 9, 1996) was a celebrated British archaeologist, known for her contributions to ancient African history. Mary and her husband was credited for discovering  the first fossilized skull of an ape as well as some ancient hominine’s tools. But did you know that Mary Leakey’s school days was not as colorful as her achievements in the field of archaeology! She was twice expelled from a convent school, yes you read it right… first when she declined to recite poetry and the second one, for unruly behavior (causing an explosion inside a laboratory). 

5. John Lennon

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John Winston Lennon (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980) was a talented singer and composer who attained worldwide popularity as the founding member of the “Beatles”, a popular pop group during the 60s.  But did you know that Lennon has a miserable school life! He was expelled from kindergarten for being naughty and was again expelled at Dovedale Primary School for misbehavior. Thanks for a guitar, her mother bought him, the rest is history. 

4. Jacques Cousteau 

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Jacques Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) “Captain Cousteau” as he was commonly known, showed his interest on ocean exploration even as a young boy. Jacques Cousteau indeed devoted much of his life to ocean exploration – done thousands of underwater photography, dozens of books and more than a hundred documentaries. But did you know that in school, he was and a real trouble maker! Why?  because he find formal schooling boring. For the record, he smashed 17 of his school’s windows! 

3. Maya Angelou 

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Maya Angelou or Marguerite Ann Johnson gained international recognition for her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, her first 17 years of life as the focal point. Here, Maya told how at a tender age (8 years old) she was exposed to racism and her ordeal as a rape victim. For some years, Maya was unable to speak thus she was kicked out from school. Despite these bitter experiences and early setbacks in her life, Maya did not lose hope but strived hard to gain respect and recognition. To date, Dr. Maya Angelou had received over 30 honorary degrees. 

2. Salvador Dalí

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Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904-January 23, 1989) was a celebrated 20th century Spanish artist well known for his his 1931 “The Persistence of Memory”. An intelligent student but known for his insubordination, Dali was expelled from Madrid’s San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts for refusing to take his final exams. Dali’s reason.. he taught he was “more qualified than his lecturers”. 

1. Albert Einstein

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Albert Einstein deemed as one of the greatest scientists that ever lived was a 1921 Nobel prize winner for his work about the “Theory of relativity”. But did you know that he was a slow learner! He spoke his first words “The milk was too hot” at the age of three and took another six years to speak normally. At school, young Einstein having difficulty adjusting to the then prevailing education system, and his disliked for boring memorization received low grades. To make matter worst, he was expelled from school for his unruly behaviors. 

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Harrison was born in the UK from part-Irish ancestry. He had humble, working class beginnings, but became the almost legendary lead guitarist in ‘The Beatles.’ Later in his music career, he embraced Hinduism, a belief which led him to organise a charity concert for Bangladesh in 1971. He is listed in Rolling Stone Magazine as number twenty one of “The Hundred Best Guitarists of All Time.” He also had a very successful career as a solo artist and as a film and record producer. Harrison wore his big, bushy moustache for quite a number of years during his musical career, and if you ever got confused with which Beatle was which, this iconic piece of facial hair always served to distinguish him from the rest of the band.

Freddy Mercury

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As the composer of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Freddy Mercury – born Farrokh Bulsara – was one of the most well-known musicians of his time. He was based in the UK but was of Parsis origin, born in East Africa (Zanzibar). He was schooled in India, but shortly after returning to his home country, his family fled to London when he was only seventeen years old, to escape the revolution. He had a clear, four-octave voice range and sensationally ate up the stage when it came to live performances and television (remember the ‘I Want to Break Free’ video?). He died aged forty-five of AIDS related complications in November of 1991. Freddy Mercury wore his moustache during most of his years as a performer. It started big, got smaller, and increased in size again. He was definitely a musician that could not hide in any disguise whatsoever. His moustache was noticeable regardless of anything else he wore – or didn’t wear.

Salvador Dalí

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Born in 1904, Dali had such a unique moustache that the style was named after him. It was long and pointy, curving upwards, with areas past the corner of the mouth shaved.

Salvador Dali was a surrealist painter from Catalan. He was mainly known for his talent in painting, but he was a dab hand at film, sculpture and photography as well. His style was eccentric and flamboyant, and he often attracted attention to himself by exhibiting bizarre behaviour. This sort of eccentricity started when he was at art school, from which he was expelled just before his final exams for stating that none of the instructors were cleaver or talented enough to examine him. He later became heavily involved in controversial politics and eventually was banned from the surrealist society. I blame the moustache.

Robert Mugabe

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Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born in 1924 and has controversially led Zimbabwe for twenty-eight years. He first qualified as a teacher, but has since acquired six degrees – two of them law degrees.

Mugabe has always sported a toothbrush moustache, the same type as Hitler’s (see part part one). Now they’ve spoilt that style for anyone else who fancied himself a toothbrush-moustache kind of man.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe is the current President of Zimbabwe, an office he’s held on to despite the world’s view of him. This position in the beginning, earned him respect and reverence from his countrymen and several Western nations  alike, but he has since become one of the most disliked African Presidents in history. Added to his questionable politics, he also started one of the world’s biggest hyperinflation by printing hundreds of trillions of Zimbabwean dollars.

Thomas Selleck

Wiki photo- Alan Light

Tom Selleck was born in 1945 in Detroit, Michigan. When he was a teenager, he twice appeared in The Dating Game – losing both times. He later became an actor and has also become a successful screenwriter and film producer.  Magnum P.I was his most famous starring role to date, but it could’ve been much different. He was cast as Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark, but when Magnum’s producers refused to release him from his contract, the role went to Harrison Ford instead.

After Selleck decided to do the honourable thing  and stick with Universal Studios, filming was delayed for a period of six months, which meant that he would’ve been able to complete filming as Indiana after all. What a bummer this must have been for him, considering the film series’ continual success.

With his winning smile, and jet black, immaculate moustache, Tom Selleck was noticeable anywhere he went.  The only drawback was that he was sometimes mistaken for Burt Reynolds, another moustached heart-throb. One important thing to note about Selleck, is that the ‘Friends’ (the sitcom in which he played Monica’s sweetheart) producers had to stop having live audiences, because they couldn’t control them when he was appearing. What a star.

Charles Bronson

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Bronson was the eleventh of fifteen children, born to a poverty-stricken Lithuanian family living in Pennsylvania.  When Bronson was ten, his father died, which meant that he had to work in the coal mines for a reportedly one dollar per ton.  When he was twenty-two, he joined the U.S Army Air Forces and served as an Aircraft gunner in WWll. He then changed his name from Buchinsky to Bronson, and after many baby steps in the filming industry, Bronson made his mark and got himself noticed in ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ He is now known for a number of action-hero-type films including ‘The Dirty Dozen.’ His ‘Death Wish’ series was extremely popular and ran for almost twenty years. Bronson died aged eighty-one in 2003, from pneumonia. He was also suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Chuck Norris

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Chuck Norris was born, Carlos Ray Norris, on March 10, 1940, in Oklahoma. He was from a working class family, and was from Irish/Cherokee decent. When he was eighteen, he joined the National Air Force as an Air Policeman, and earned himself the name, Chuck.  He was based in South Korea, which is where he picked up an interest in Tang Soo Du. When he returned to the U.S, he opened a chain of Karate schools for kids, and later became internationally known for his masterful roundhouse kick. His acting career kicked off successfully and he became world-famous in his role as Cordell Walker in ‘Walker, Texas Ranger.’ He’s also known for a number of tough-guy film roles. His moustache has evolved through the years. At one time he had just a moustache, but then graduated to a full beard, then back to just a moustache again.

All these men made an impact creatively, politically, or socially. I am tempted to think that if it wasn’t for the moustaches, they would be ordinary looking men who would not be so readily identifiable. What do you think?

Don’t miss the first part of this series!

Luis Buñuel’s films have been called by some poetry on the screen. One writer goes so far as to say about Buñuel’s controversial film, Un Chien andalou (The Andalusan Dog) that it is “little more than filmed poetry” (Mellen 156). Actually, few people can watch the film without squirming in their seats as a woman’s eye is sliced open with a razor. Where is the meaning in this scene? What were its author’s intentions?

Was Luis Buñuel a madman or a poetic genius? Was he a man disgruntled with a bourgeoisie society or an artist portraying reality? Was he just a grown up child rebelling against his society’s institutions or was he part of a movement that exploded the art scene forever? Perhaps he was all of those things, but most certainly, he was a poet, with all the chaotic confusion that comes with that title.

To get at the genius that was Buñuel one must read, read, and read some more about Buñuel’s life and the era in which he came to filmmaking. Of course, one must also watch the films and to do so one needs to approach the mastery of the artist with the devotion that Buñuel himself created them. Many have tried to unmask the man and certainly every one of them has failed, including Buñuel himself.

In typical Buñuelian manner, the surrealist filmmaker quite often contradicts himself on the subject of how and why he made his films. He sometimes insists Un Chien andalou is poetry on the screen and other times he insists that the film means absolutely nothing. In fact, Buñuel has been quoted as remarking on the supposed ‘meaning’ in Un Chien andalou, “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis” (Mellen 153).

He also says that Un Chien andalou has nothing to do with dreams, yet in his autobiography, The Last Sigh, he specifically states that he and painter Salvador Dali began the film from dreams they had. “I made Un Chien andalou, which came from an encounter between two dreams” (Buñuel 103). The scene of the moon being sliced by a cloud was Buñuel’s and the ants marching from a hand were from a dream Dali had.

To understand Buñuel’s poetics it is necessary to understand the surrealist movement in which he was firmly entrenched. Andre Breton sums up the surrealist manifesto, “Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, … I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from (psychiatric) patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control… and which as much as possible represents spoken thought” (Gascoyne 46). The surrealists, and the neorealists that came after them, were very immersed in expressing reality in nonreal terms. “The French regarded it (film) as the vehicle of revelation, and the knowledge revealed was not always expressible in words” (Hill 66).

Salvador Dali recalled the surrealists ideology, “It is possible to systematize confusion thanks to a paranoia and active process of thought and so assist in discrediting completely the world of reality” (Gould 37). Like the French Impressionists, Surrealists made films that portrayed dreamlike states, actual dreams, nonlinear movement, and violent interactions. They express emotions, especially the dark emotions that societies and people in general try to hide from themselves.

In The Last Sigh, Buñuel says of the surrealist movement, “The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself” (Buñuel 107). As with any good poet, Buñuel and his surrealist friends hoped their art would perform the transformation. But he goes on to point out that even though many of the surrealists became famous, “one good look around is evidence enough of our failure” (Buñuel 123). Andre Breton says to Buñuel, “It’s sad, mon cher Luis, but it’s no longer possible to scandalize anybody!” (Buñuel 114).

This statement from a Japanese magazine article illustrates the driving force behind Buñuel’s artistic endeavors. “The greater theme running through his best films is that institutions such as church, state, and family are corrupting only because they give man an entirely false idea of himself” (Mellen 111). For Buñuel, as well as the other surrealists, men could never live an authentic life if they insisted on living the mythic life created for them by the institutions.

The great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats discusses in his essays the concept that we are all raised in a myth. We are all taught to exist as metaphors, as symbols of something supposedly greater than ourselves. If we are, as Yeats postulates, merely symbols of something greater then how are we to uncover first what that symbol represents, and second, how that symbol represents our true self? As people become symbols they become abstract, something ideal rather than real. Thus, we are all living an illusory existence, an existence created by others. This is the truth that Buñuel brings to the screen. He attempts to expose the lie – which is not really a lie, it is the truth that society refuses to reveal, even to itself.

So, those who fail to recognize their lives as metaphor constitute the larger population, and those who do recognize their lives as metaphor constitute the smallest population. But it is in that smallest population that redemption and truths are found, because you cannot find truth while living the lie. Writer Pardo Bazin says that surrealistic poetry and film attempts “to mirror reality exactly as it is” (Mellen 139). It is in this context that Buñuel creates.

To be special means to accept and then refute the metaphor – either of your own accord or someone else’s. And the danger in discarding the ‘special’ is that we may very well be discarding the one person who can teach us the truth. Poet or madman – there is no doubt that Buñuel is one of these special people.

Regardless, the films, writings, and paintings of the surrealist movement are universal and timeless in the sense that in every period of time, societies are struggling with the balance of power among its members, and there are always budding poets ready to take up the sword of battle. To wage the war the surrealists were forever dreaming up new ways to scandalize. “…we all felt a certain destructive impulse, a feeling that for me has been even stronger than the creative urge” (Buñuel 107). They all felt the need to be as outrageous and scandalous as possible in order to point out to society the decadence and immorality of its institutions. They doggedly went about achieving their goal through what Buñuel calls “surrealist capers”. These ‘capers’ were meant to cause scandal.

In this endeavor – creating scandals – they succeeded admirably. Buñuel was only one of the surrealist artists that was considered a madman. The entire group of them were in and out of prison, had their art banned, audiences threw rocks at them, and the Pope excommunicated many of them. Buñuel states that,

“The novelist (filmmaker) will have acquitted himself honorably of his task when, by means of an accurate portrait of authentic social relations, he will have destroyed the conventional view of the nature of those relations, shattered the optimism of the bourgeois world, and forced the reader to question the permanency of the prevailing order, and this even if the author does not offer us any solutions, even if he does not clearly take sides” (Mellen 110).

Many of Buñuel’s films were banned, including L’Age d’or, which was, in Buñuel’s words, “a film about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever becoming one” (Buñuel 117). The film was actually an attack on the bourgeoisie and religion. In one scene two drunks drive a horsecart through a room full of people having a party, seemingly indifferent to the bourgeoisie’s activities, illustrating the hostility felt towards the bourgeoisie.

Additionally, the cinematography of L’Age d’or is beautiful in its artistry. The scenes dissolve into one another, moving from one sexual image to another. A man and a woman are fighting desire and passion throughout the film. The scenes move into one another, juxtaposing the man and woman against other scenes, such as a child being killed, a band of soldiers dying, a cross with hair on it, etc. Regardless of location – church, stores, bedrooms – the sexuality of the couple penetrate the entire film, illustrating the darker passions society keeps hidden from itself.

The viewing of L’Age d’or produced “the scandal of L’Age d’or” in Paris. Buñuel actually hid behind a screen with rocks in pockets when the film was first released – he feared the audience might riot. They didn’t that time but eventually the film did cause extensive rioting in France and it was banned from France. It did not reopen until 1980 in New York and 1981 in Paris. (Buñuel 118).

The surrealists many tenets centered on the imagination and the irrational. For them, individual images held stories themselves and the artists spent considerable time creating their art from single images, the more irrational the better. On the topic of inspiration Buñuel says of his work, “It may be a picture I’ve seen: for example, an image of St. Viridiana, an image capable of triggering off other images, which in turn lead to a complete idea” (Mellen 116).

This is the way Buñuel and Dali created Un Chien andalou. The film is made entirely of irrational images strung together in a haphazard form. The film follows no narrative sequence – it is not linear, it is not circular – like the workings of the inner states of being the film is pure visual sensation. The film careens through a landscape of utter despair with scenes of murder, sexuality, and hideous dreamlike images that seem to fulfill no purpose.

What could all of these images mean – a man harnessed to a horse with two people being dragged (one of them portrayed by Dali himself), ants marching purposefully from a hole in a mans hand, a woman’s breasts being roughly fondled, and of course the famous scene where a woman is getting her eye sliced open with a razor? Were Buñuel and Dali attempting to create the rational out of the irrational? Not exactly. Michael Gould states in Surrealism and the Cinema, “If the vision revealed is too much for the rational mind to absorb (too intense, too threatening, too ‘real’) yet cannot be rejected, then it leaves the consciousness and comes to exist on a sublime level as pure surrealism” (Gould 13).

This brings us to the problematic nature of meaning. Buñuel’s films defy meaning. Buñuel’s films are rife with miscommunications, skewed meanings, and misread intentions. We find ourselves yearning to know the intention of the author. We have two main characters – a man and a woman – but we are lost as to where these two characters are moving. They never really do anything that we can ascribe a ‘meaning’ to.

Un Chien andalou 

creates a dream like state and we feel that we are moving swiftly through someone’s subconscious. In Poetry and Cinema, Buñuel says, “A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream” (Mellen 107). One of the ways Buñuel accomplishes this is by allowing time and space to be distorted with use of dissolves and montages. If one watches the movie with the understanding that there is no meaning then Un Chien andalou becomes ‘readable’, even if it does defy interpretation. Buñuel says, “you don’t announce: ‘This is a dream.’ Because then the viewer will say: ‘Ah, this is a dream. Then it’s not important. The Public is disappointed, and the film loses its mystery, its power to disturb people” (Lenti 212). Dali stated in 1928, of the film’s theme: “the pure and correct line of ‘conduct’ of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian, patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality” (Sadoul 391).

In addition to the problematic nature of meaning, there is no sense of destination in Un Chien andalou. The film begins with the title “Once upon a time…” and the audience is deluded into believing they are going to be presented with a story, with a narrative. Nothing really happens. The entire film consists of vignettes, small episodic scenes that are moving only from one scene of violence and sexuality to another. To further confound the audience, after Buñuel unceremoniously slices open the woman’s eye with his razor, the audience is offered another title – “Eight years later…”. The audience wonders if now the narrative will begin. It doesn’t.

If you take away the plot line (the narrative structure) and you take away the character study, what do you have left? What you have left is simply a documentary of real life – or in Buñuel’s case, a documentary of inner life. What you have left is poetry. “…in all films, good or bad – and beyond and despite the intentions of directors – cinematic poetry struggles to come to the surface and reveal itself” (Mellen 107). What the surrealists were reaching for is more clearly defined in the terms of poetry. Buñuel says, “…each person pours a certain dose of subjective feeling into what he is looking at, because no one sees things as they are but as his desires and his state of mind make him see them” (Mellen 109). Which means that, as in poetry, each viewer (reader) brings their own ‘reading’ to the film, based on their own past experiences. If the images cause the viewer uncomfortable sensations and feelings then perhaps the viewer needs to open his eyes and examine why.

Buñuel says in a 1953 address called Poetry and Cinema “The cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply” (Mellen 107). Poetry is written to create an emotion within the reader, to put into words emotions that are impossible to express – this is done through the use of metaphor. What Buñuel has succeeded in doing is taking that idea a step further, not putting into words the emotionally charged images, but actually showing the emotional images on the screen.

Buñuel says further, “Mystery, the essential element of every work of art, is in general lacking in films. Authors, directors and producers are at pains not to disturb our peace, by leaving the window on to the liberating world of poetry tightly closed” (Mellen). Buñuel’s films take pains to disturb our peace. Everything you see in Un Chien andalou will disturb and horrify and, ultimately, liberate.

Still, you have to worry about the sanity of a man who says in his autobiography, “The symbolic significance of terrorism has a certain attraction for me: the idea of destroying the whole social order, the entire human species” (Buñuel 126). But then how many of us have not at some time or another been so disgusted with the moral order of our society that we have not thought the very same thing? Buñuel simply has the courage (or audacity) to speak the thought out loud. Which is precisely where he is headed in his films – to speak the unspeakable, which is actually one of the many definitions of poetry.

We have to face the fact that Buñuel himself is not sure of his direction Un Chien andalou. He asks, “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press and the inane herd that saw beauty and poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate call for murder?” (Bauche 9). But then in another interview he states, “The sources from which the film draws inspiration are those of poetry, freed from the ballast of reason and tradition” (Mellen 151).

Which statement are we to believe? Does Buñuel even know? Perhaps what he is trying to suggest is that the emotions that are “a desperate call for murder” are expressed poetically, “freed from reason and tradition”. Tradition is the key word here. Buñuel’s art is mired in a rejection of tradition, a rejection of the social and cultural force that shapes his world. Like so many poets before him, Buñuel uses his films to unmask the myths that society has placed on its members.

Finally, Buñuel’s films are universal and timeless in the sense that in every period of time, societies are struggling with the balance of power among its members, “the entrapment by the bourgeoisie” (Mellen 3). In a 1939 article for Cosmological Eye, writer Henry Miller has this to say about Luis Buñuel, “They have called Buñuel everything—traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they dare not call him. True, it is lunacy he portrays in his film, but it not of his making.” (Mellen 172).

As all great poets before him, Buñuel rises from the ashes, covered in ashes in hopes of a new world. He attempts to force open the eyes, to slice them open if necessary, of the masses of society who are destroying themselves in their deluded institutions. Perhaps Buñuel sums up his aesthetic the best with this quote from My Last Sigh, “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths” (Buñuel 5). Regardless of whether Buñuel’s aesthetic leans toward chaos and confusion, his art becomes a dynamic poetry alive on the screen.

Among the leaders of the Modernist movement, Sigmund Freud, a psychologist, had a particularly significant impact. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories were very foundational in the scientific study of the self and proceeded to shape many of the Modernist ideals. Freud did not glorify this movement like some of his peers in early Modernism, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. He was simply an observer of the human psyche and took a scientific approach that had never been seen before. Freud’s most widely known theories are analysis of the human consciousness.

In Freud’s Outline of Psycho-Analysis, he explains his theory that the human mind is controlled primarily by unconscious impulses which help in determining the majority of our actions. Freud divides the self into three parts: the id, ego, and super ego. The id “contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution – above all, therefore, the instincts.” This is the determining factor in many of our actions, as well as where the majority of unconscious human impulses and desires stem from. The ego, Freud states, is the “intermediary between the id and the external world.” The ego stores our experiences and helps us adapt to our circumstances. The job of the ego is to control and prioritize our instincts, as well as seek pleasure. The super ego is purely a matter of external influence on the self. Freud states that the super ego is shaped mostly by parental influence, but also “later successors, teachers, and admired social ideals.” Freud states that the id, ego, and super ego work together and regulate every aspect of the human brain.

Freud’s emphasis on the significant control of the irrational, unconscious desires of man are very contradictory to the philosophies of the Enlightenment. These philosophies focus mainly on human reason as the guide to truth. If Freud’s theories are correct, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human rationality must be misguided because humans are fundamentally irrational. Another large basis of the Enlightenment philosophy was based on the innate goodness of mankind. Freud contradicts this view, stating that if the self is controlled by our most primitive urges, man cannot be inherently good. Freud states that these impulses are irrational and self serving. Also, the Enlightenment philosophies stated that man lived by his own free will and significantly influenced his own outcome. Modernists, such as Freud, contradicted these ideas, theorizing that humans are, for a large part, products of their environment and experiences. Freud’s controversial ideas raised very important questions about the human condition which helped spur the revolution against Enlightenment thought.

The general consensus of these ideas among Modernist thinkers of the 20th century began a shift away from the strict rules of reason and towards a concentration on the self and the psyche. Modernists sought to reinvent culture through embracing the subjective. There was an uprising in the focus on human emotion. The Modernists began to probe the bizarre and mysterious nature of the human mind using every possible medium. The Modernists would no longer let the inflexible rationality of the past have priority to imagination. Reason, they believed, had the ability to asphyxiate the imaginative and emotional side of humanity. In turn, the belief in absolute reality of the Enlightenment was being replaced with a subjective and relative reality. This new view of reality embraced introspection and denied external, physical reality as the sole guide to truth.

Modern artists also reflected these changes in thought, broke free of classical styles, and completely redefined art. Art was becoming less of a reflection of one solid reality and more a reflection of how the artist viewed reality. Classical art merely depicted images as they appeared, while Modern era artists relied much more heavily on creative spontaneity stemming from the artists mind. Ironic mockery of the past ideals also emerged in both literature and artwork.

The Surrealists, a largely influential group of Modern artists, introduced a completely unprecedented form of artwork that strongly reflect these Modernist ideals. Andre Breton, a leader in the surrealist movement, wrote in Le Manifeste du Surrealisme that with the abandonment of “absolute rationalism” the human imagination would be “on the verge of recovering its rights.” The artwork digs deeply into the imaginative, examining the great mysteries of what is above and beyond the reality to which human perception is limited. The surrealist artwork was incredibly focused on the psyche, most of it being dream oriented with a strong focus on altered states of consciousness. The surrealists were influenced greatly by Freud’s ideas and created artwork portraying a combination of objective reality and the unconscious, bizarre reality of the mind. This manifestation of Modernist thought revolutionized artwork by creating a focus on individual perspective like had never been seen before.

Salvador Dali was one of the later, yet most influential artists in the surrealist movement. Dali’s pieces are bizarre and often lack any sort of depth perception. His paintings are filled with paradoxical images of the beautiful and obscene. The imagery is usually twisted together randomly and appears to make little sense at first glance. It is not uncommon to notice body parts hidden nonsensically within formless skin-like blobs. When looking at a piece of Dali’s work it is not unusual to find yourself thinking you are looking at one object, then minutes later the sudden realization comes that you are looking at something completely different that was hidden in the complexity of the painting. Individual perspective is a major part of interpreting Dali’s work. Dali seems to draw the viewer in under false pretenses, completely changing their thoughts and interpretation once he has their attention. Much of his artwork seems to be ambiguous and vague, yet still asking the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

It is obvious that Dali’s inspiration comes from tapping into the unconscious psyche. Dali’s work is incredibly representative of Freud’s theories about the mind. Dali has a very apparent love for the irrational and primitive impulses. Much of his artwork is bluntly and disturbingly sexual with no emphasis on beauty. In “Illumined Pleasures,” Dali paints both sadistic and erotic images, irrationally joined in sexual relationships. Dali seems to paint as if he were trying to put his id onto paper. The chaotic primal instincts that Freud claims make up the core of human being are clearly reflected in Dali’s fascination with the juxtaposition of love and death, as well as the beautiful and repulsive.

Salvador Dali’s focus on the chaos of the human psyche is very contrary to the Enlightenment focus on the rules of nature. Enlightenment artists focused on the external, natural beauty of existence, while Dali intentionally distorts this beauty to portray his personal view of reality, as well as his psychological interactions with it. Dali attempts to embrace the disturbing paradoxes of reality, as opposed to Enlightenment artists who tried to explain them as best as they could using reason. Dali seems to make the point that individual reality is all that is real. Attempting to find truth through the rules of the external world is impossible because each individual has a different view and perspective from which to interpret it. Dali allows no room for self explanatory images in his artwork, because to do so would be an acknowledgment of a concrete, absolute reality. Salvador Dali’s work is very representative of the ideals of the Modernist Movement.

Whether it be the study of psychoanalysis, the rise of surrealism in art, or the overall shift in attitude away from Enlightenment thought, Modernism’s reflection in society was undeniable. The movement’s philosophy permeated cultural thought to such a degree that it led to the total abandonment of the traditional ideals and created a brand new starting point from which today’s culture is The Modernist Movement was an uprising in revolutionary thought that completely changed the way in which society views human nature.