Dalí’s Paranoid-Critical Method: What And What Are Its Characteristics
Surely more than one remembers the famous drawing of the old-young woman, in which, depending on how and who looked, the image of a girl or an old woman appeared before us. The drawing in question does nothing more than collect the precepts of Salvador Dalí’s famous paranoid-critical method or, what is the same, enter the viewer’s mind and manipulate it.
Said like that, it sounds quite forceful, and even disturbing. However, we are tired of contemplating works that follow this idea, especially those that form the Dalinian corpus; representations of a totally subjective reality whose ultimate creator is the viewer.
In this article we will talk about Dalí’s paranoid-critical method, what its characteristics are and what it meant for Surrealism and art history in general.
The paranoid-critical method is based on the ability of the human brain to perceive relationships between things that, in reality, have no association This phenomenon has been widely studied by science, and there have been many artists who have been inspired by this curiosity of the mind to create no less curious works.
Because, in fact, and although he was its main promoter, Salvador Dalí was not strictly the creator of this system, although he did baptize it with this original name (in his line, of course) and exploited it to the limit.
Take for example his famous painting The three ages executed in 1940.
A priori, what our brain captures are three faces, related to the three ages of the title: the child, the young man and the old man.
However, if we take another look at the painting, perhaps we will notice the elements that remain hidden from the viewer’s retina: the young man is, in reality, a woman and a child sitting in front of a hole in the rock, and the eyes, some distant mountains that look like a mask. As for the old man on the left side of the canvas, he is, in turn, composed of an old woman hunched over some trees. Thus, magically, a different picture appears before our view a new work, another reality.
In 1932, Dalí was already immersed in the group of surrealists, who had welcomed him in Paris in 1929. However, in the 1930s the Catalan painter began to separate himself from the guidelines of the “official” movement and began to follow their own rules. This, of course, did not please the rest of the surrealists, who ended up expelling Dalí from the group in 1934.
That year, 1932, a copy of the work fell into his hands. De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalitéwritten by his friend Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who, according to Dalí in his memoirs (see bibliography), went to visit him following the publication of his article The rotten donkey, which had greatly impressed the psychiatrist. With Lacan he later collaborated on the first issue of the magazine Minotaure, one of the most iconic publications of the surrealist movement.
Lacan’s book emphasizes that, contrary to what classical psychiatry stipulated, paranoid delirium is the result of the conjunction between the interpretation of the mind and the delusion
That is, unlike what was postulated in the classrooms, where it was stated that to create paranoid delirium there must first be an erroneous interpretation of reality, Lacan maintained that both phenomena occurred at the same time. From this idea Dalí drew the basis of what would become his most famous method.
playing with the brain
But Dalí’s inspiration did not stop there. Tireless and curious, he studied in depth how paranoia worked in the brain, and He especially paid attention to how the fishermen of Cap de Creus named the rocks on the cliffs These names had a lot to do with the figures that their minds “saw”, and that varied depending on the person, the perspective and the time of day: an eagle, a rooster, a camel… Something similar happens when we stare at a cloudy sky. of clouds and we try to “discover” what shape they have.
Therefore, it is clear that the human brain creates realities and establishes connections that, in truth, do not exist. Paranoia has a lot to do with this, since clinically it is thoughts, generally obsessive, that have little or nothing to do with reality. In both cases, the mind is interpreting a specific element in its own way.
With all this, the Catalan painter devised a system to recreate this paranoid effect on the viewer, through works expressly designed for this purpose. The table that we have cited previously, The three agesis a good example of this, but we also find this method in other Dalinian creations, such as Apparition of a Face and a Fruit Bowl on a Beach (1938), or Galatea of the Spheres (1952), in which a series of atoms end up drawing the face of a woman (in this case, Gala, his wife).
Dalí and the “new surrealism”
Although the paranoid-critical method was not the cause of Dalí’s expulsion from the group of Breton and company (the fact that he did not adhere to communism had much more to do with it), we can say that The basic idea of this new Dalinian system is totally contrary to the proposal of the surrealists
On the one hand, Breton and his colleagues supported automatic creation (the so-called automatism) whose basis was the conscious non-participation in the execution of the work. In the case of Dalí, however, everything is scrupulously studied. The paranoid-critical method leaves nothing to chance, precisely because it plays with the compositions to stimulate the viewer’s mind. There is nothing automatic in Dalí’s creation, but rather a well-thought-out system organized in detail.
André Breton, the leader of the movement, even praised Salvador Dalí, whom he considered endowed with enormous talent, and in his book Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme (published the same year as Dalí’s expulsion from the group), affirms that the paranoid-critical method is an “instrument of the first order.” It is curious, then, that despite such fascination, the divergences ended up weighing more, with the result that we all know.
The other paranoid-critical methods
Yes, Dalí was the greatest exponent of this method and took advantage of it in all its expression, but we have already said that it was not an original method. For centuries, the history of art has made use of the erroneous interpretation of reality to create powerful and engaging images. Without going any further, the famous Renaissance trompe-l’oeils (whose name is already sufficiently explicit, trompe-l’oeil, “trap to the eye”) do not stop using, in a certain way, the Dalinian paranoid-critical method.
On the other hand, there are artists who have gained their fame through “playing with the brain.” Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93), for example, created his famous portraits with fruits with this intention. His work Fruit Basket, executed around 1590, is a still life if we look at it from the right; but if we turn the canvas, a human face suddenly appears. A little more recently, artists such as Charles Allen Gilbert (1873-1929) left us his own contribution to the method with his work Everything is Vanity, quite reproduced, where a girl appears looking in a mirror that, carefully observed, turns into a skull. . But Dalí himself was aware of all this when he projected a work about the surrealists before the surrealists that, unfortunately, never saw the light of day.
