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Techniques of the Observer

ion necessary for Brewster's industrial delirium is made possible by same forces of modernization that allowed Baudelaire to use kaleidoscope as a model for kinetic experience of the multiplicity of life itself and flickering race of all its elements.44 43. Sir David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction [1819], rpt. London, John Murray, 1858, pp. 134-136. 44. Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, Oeuvres complites, Paris, Gallimard, 1961, p. 1161.

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Marie-José Baudinet : The body and the inanimate in still-life. It is now possible, in the light of recent studies, to analyse still-life painting in a new way. Faced with these tables and buffets, we must consider 18th-century life in the stillness of its digestions, but also death, present in the designation «nature morte ». The representation of food becomes a metaphor for the living body, fixed on a canvas, explicitly abstracted from life. The paintings of Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) have been chosen for his exemplary use of food and skin, and because his Traité de la peinture expresses what is hidden in the painting : the pox. Thus still life is part of the history of the suffering, mortal and lustful body. It is not surprising that it should predominate on the eve of a bourgeois revolution which ushered in the industrial era.

Dali's Paranoia-Criticism or The Exercise of Freedom

realism.' Max Ernst in Au-del. de la peinture considers paranoia-criticism little more sceptically as a pretty term which will probably have some success because of its paradoxical content, and suggests treating it with caution inasmuch as the notion of paranoia is employed there in sense which does not correspond to its medical meaning.2 Studied in the context of later critical studies, these two statements, Breton's and Ernst's, appear to reflect two fundamentally divergent attitudes. Breton's in Qu'est-ce-que le Surrealisme? as well as in the 1936 Le Cas Dali, accepts without hesitation both method and theory. This is also the attitude of some recent works on surrealist art, where paranoia-criticism is usually taken at face value as method which, whether successful or not, is considered as direct application of bona fide theoretical elaboration. In other words, the theory as elaborated by Dali and its results as manifested in his own paintings as well as in other activities, are seen as exhibiting direct reciprocal dependency upon each other. Max Ernst's statement places paranoia-criticism on somewhat different footing. Ernst shrewdly distinguishes between practical application of the method, as exemplified earlier in his own process of frottage, and the theory of paranoia-criticism which for him is of negligible value. However, all this is just footnote in Ernst's text and he does not pursue the matter any further. Later, Marcel Jean is more elaborately sceptical of Dali's theory in his History of Surrealist Painting. Cognizant of the paradoxical nature of Dali's method, Jean also points to the function of humor both in Dali's writing and in the theory's practical applications.3 In this paper I will explore paranoia-criticism's role as an important constructive element in the context of Dali's total oeuvre. I will begin by con-

The Fabulous Fiction of Two Surrealist Artists: Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, noted for his metaphysical paintings of deserted squares, uninhabited buildings in haunted dream worlds, is also the author of a novel which appeared in 1929, at the time of his association with surrealism. Max Ernst, an artist of far greater range, whose paintings, by their bold revelations and the dark humor of their associations, produce so disturbing an effect on the spectator, wrote an important manifesto, Au-dela de la peinture (1937), many poetic texts, either alone or in collaboration, mainly with Paul Eluard,I and published several series of collages dubbed novels. Surrealists frequently and eagerly crossed the barriers between art and literature, some by the creation of pocmesobjets or collages, others by texts illustrating plates or plates illustrating texts. Still others, the most famous being Jean Arp and Picabia, practiced throughout their career both visual and literary arts. Chirico's Hebdomeros (1929),2 which is entirely verbal, and Ernst's Une Semaine de bonti (1934),3 which is almost purely graphic, show, if not more clearly, at least in sharper relief than most other contemporary works, surrealist methods in interrelating the arts. When Chirico settled in Paris, he had already painted his most famous canvases and defined his art as metaphysical. However, his articles in Valori plastici and II convegno view painting in a historical and rather conventional perspective.4 Only in Zeusi l'esploratore5 has Chirico