Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Southampton Solent University
Railway Stations and Minotaurs: gender in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Pablo Picasso
This essay is the result of an investigation into implicit and explicit gender influences in the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). It proposes that these artists were diametrically opposed, one driven by the paternal family line, the other by the maternal; one seeking after the metaphysical and the Apollonian, the other after the physical and the Dionysian.
In order to understand the effect that parental loss, both real and imagined, had on these artists, the research employed psychoanalytical approaches to understanding trauma caused by loss. These mainly concerned concepts such as abreaction, object transference and hypercathexis.