Lecture XXVIII (Nr. 0353)
Facs
Transcript
[348] 6) Chirico: MELANCHOLY AND MYSTERY OF A STREET--This is surrealism. Surrealism has the character that the elements of it are almost photographic, as for instance this building, but that the composition of these elements is an expression of the unconscious elements in ourselves which are in us and in which we receive the world. A way quite different from our conscious encounter. And these unconscious elements show an abyss below the world of conscious encounter, which is revealed in this kind of surrealistic pictures. 7) Tanguy: HEREDITY OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERISTICS--Here you have the same thing, but perhaps something else added to it. If you ask me, I cannot answer, and I will not answer, but I will answer with something else, what this picture means for me: it means possibilities of things in time and space which do not appear there, but are results of the continuing creativity of man. We will come to back to [sic.] this in one of our great sculptures, in one of the next pictures. 8) a, THE CONSOLER--Now here the problem, why I used this, was the disappearance of the human face. There we have a great problem in modern art. I spoke very intensively about the question of portrait, the last time. And I said that the portrait expresses the incomparable uniqueness
of the individual person in the eternal dimension. Now here this face is gone, and the difficulty of ALL b is that the portrait is supposed to be similar--i.e., naturalism--and that at the same time, as a work of art, it is supposed to express, whereby the naturalistic surface is disrupted or, as here, completely disappears. These of you who have read a little about it know that there is a controversy--some Catholic authorities take the point that the human face is divinely