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When Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, he began the modern study of a phenomenon that has fascinated human beings for thousands of years. At the same time he opened a new realm, the unconscious mind, to filmmakers and artists who were inspired by his theories. This beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated book--written to commemorate the centenary of Freud's classic work--examines the shifting roles that dreams have played in twentieth-century art and science. Over the course of the twentieth century, as scientists have researched the psychology and physiology of dreams, artists from Odilon Redon and Joan Miró to Jenny Holzer, Ingmar Bergman, and Laurie Anderson have produced dramatic images centered in the unconscious. An exploration of this artistic output, this volume features a hundred color and fifty black-and-white illustrations depicting work by a broad range of artists in painting, photography, sculpture, video, film, performance, dance, and other media. In her opening essay, Lynn Gamwell reviews the psychoanalytic understanding of dreams and explores the ways in which Freud's theories have been interpreted artistically. The next essay, by Ernest Hartmann, traces attempts to link somatic and psychological dimensions of dreaming and to discover parallels between these dimensions and creative thought. In the final essay, Donald Kuspit assesses the impact of the transition from the mystical outlook that human beings held in the nineteenth century to the twentieth-century scientific paradigm for the human mind. A century of dreamwork is captured in this stunning volume, which concludes with a "dream archive"--an illustrated catalogue raisonné of approximately five hundred examples of twentieth-century art about dreams. Contributors: Lucy Daniels, Lucy Daniels Foundation, Raleigh, N.C.; Lynn Gamwell, State University of New York, Binghamton; Ernest Hartmann, M.D., Tufts University School of Medicine; Donald Kuspit, State University of New York, Stony Brook; August Ruhs, M.D., Universitëtsklinik für Tiefenpsychologie und Psychotherapie, Vienna… (more)
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Ernest Hartmann contributed the essay on "The Psychology of Dreaming, a new synthesis"; and Donald Kuspit contributed "From Vision to Dream: the secularization of the imagination."
Some of the more striking images are:
Frida Kahlo's El Sueño (The Dream) Shows a woman sleeping on a lower bunk with a sort of skeleton or broken body on the upper bunk.
Olga Bulgakova's Dream about the Red Bird shows a red bird superimposed upon an all gray scene where an older man is stabbing a woman clutching her side whose head is is shared with another person having a headache, Outside of the window floats a triangle, one of whose points is painted red, and inside is a fuzzy floating orb near scissors, a crumpled curtain and an eye painted on paper.
Suzanne Scherer's Labyrinth shows a sleeping man in the center of the labyrinth with no exit to the outside. The surrounding text starts: I was walking down a dark tunnel....
Paul Klee's Starker Traum (A Vivid Dream) shows a man sleeping with a sort of winged vestment with visions of a red sun and a yellow quarter moon.
René Magritte's L'Art de la Conversation (The Art of the Conversation) shows the word, RÉVE (dream in French), constructed of Stonehenge-like building blocks in a desert-like landscape.
If this book and exhibition had occurred ten years later, perhaps illustrations from Carl Jung's "Red Book", might have been included.
A lot to ponder and experience in this book.