The surrealist art movement is one which is known for tapping into the unconscious mind and expressing what the artist finds. There have been many prominent figures in different arts and sciences throughout history who have had similar ideas. Some of these have been in literature, psychology, film, and the visual arts. In the visual arts, Salvador Dali was the most important contributor to the surrealist art movement because of his paranoid-critical method. His contribution is one that has essentially shaped the purpose of surrealist art, and this method is what he used for the vast majority of his artworks which gave the movement more public popularity. The surrealist movement may have failed had it not been for Dali and his method. …show more content…
As Elder describes the method, “it involves allowing images that arise from the unconscious to enter consciousness, just like the disorder of paranoia. The artist then freezes these images in the form of art instead of letting them flee like paranoia, which this allows one's consciousness to have the opportunity to comprehend the meaning of this now frozen image which the unconscious produced.” (352, 353). The method thus was made up of two stages which may occur simultaneously. The first stage being the submission to the paranoid thought process, and the second stage being the critical where associates are sought after. Paranoia is a higher state of awareness. It is an awareness that is unburdened by such trivialities as plausibility or verification, which is why Dali chose to relate his method to this. By inducing this paranoid state Dali found that he could get rid of previous notions, concepts, and understandings. This allowed Dali to visually conceptualize his unconscious thoughts in an untainted and unchanged manner.There have been also been other artists in different art movements before Dali and the surrealist movement who had a method similar to this and who undoubtedly influenced Dali in this method. One of these artists was Leonardo Da Vinci. Da Vinci had a method of scribblings and drawings where he could perceive many different images within one configuration. This is comparable to when a person stares at stucco on the ceiling and creates different images which carry on in one's thought process. So although Da Vinci was the first to create a method of having images appear from one configuration, it was Dali who developed it to the next level by simulating paranoia so that images could appear without the need of having any one configuration but rather being able to produce them from a blank slate. This was the method which gave the surrealist movement the ability to be free