stituted an essential portion of every human being. Because of the universal character of their subject matter, they also saw their artwork as breaking free from the confines of the "conscious" and thus could be appreciated by a larger audience, immediately intuitive and comprehensible to all. All of this, according to Andr Breton, was in an effort to "give back to man the force of his primitive instincts" (Harrison and Wood 440).These primitivist aspects of Surrealism are exemplified in the works of Salvador Dal. In The Persistence of Memory (1931), Dal critiques the notion of time and rejects it as a modern construction that is utterly useless within the framework of the primitive human subconscious, evidenced by the warping and distortion of the clocks in the painting. The barren landscape pictured in the piece represents the great expanse of the subconscious while also evoking a primitive landscape, untouched by the hands of civilization. The Great Masturbator (1929) illustrates the profound effect that human sexuality has on the subconscious. The nightmarish images of ants and a grasshopper combined with the sex scene rising out of a human head create a dichotomy that at once asserts the primacy and primitivism of human sexuality while also reaffirming the social and moral restrictions placed on this area of human expression. The repeated images of the lions head in The Accomadations of Desire (1929) indicates the multiple permutations that a dream may go through. For the Surrealists, the dream is the ultimate manifestation of the subconscious because it is through the dream that the primitve human emerges. Through all of these works, Dal attempts to evoke the most primitive aspects of the human condition through a reading of the subconscious.The Fauvist, Die Brcke and Surrealist manifestations of the exotic in their artwork illustrate that the primitive has numerous levels of interpretation and depiction between artistic ...
