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From Introduction: We not only tolerate violence, we put it on the front pages of our newspapers. One-third or one-fourth of our television programmes use it for the amusement of our children. Condone! My dear friends, we love it." -Karl Menninger, psychiatrist. War is one of the most violent of man's past-times, yet many of the atrocities committed are termed heroic deeds. Andre Malraux, one of the leading writer-philosophers of his day, praised the international involvement by so many writers, artists, etc. in the Spanish Civil War as one of the most wonderful deeds of brotherhood in the history of mankind. There is a strange idolatry that is often accorded to violent criminals such as the early American outlaws, and people like Charles Manson, around whom an entire cult has sprung up. The "aggressive machismo" is something that boys and young men strive to achieve in most countries in the Western world. Scientlsts and philosophers have puzzled these paradoxes for centuries, and this effort to unravel the mystery of violence and aggression bears a fateful significant. For the quality of human life and the survival of man are involved. Robbery, rape, riots, vandalism, are all now part of man's existence. Around the world, violence has soared. In London, violent crimes increased by 39 per cent in three years. Even sports events (the soccer fans stage gang wars at most soccer matches nowadays, especially in England,) and entertainment ---books, movies, television--- have become permeated with violence. It has not always been as bad as this, and as art imitates life, life imitates art, and so aggressive paintings, threatening paintings are now commonplace. In this dissertation, I have studied this development of threat in painting. What follows is the course my study has taken.

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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The intention of this thesis and this series of paintings was to discover a universal bond between Surrealism and Abstract Art. It examined the origin of creative motivation and observed the similarities between these forms of creative production.For examples and information the writer researched Salvador Deli and Max Ernst of the Surrealistic schools; Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock represented the Abstract school. Objectification of unconscious processes was expressed through the inner wishes end dreamstates of both the Surrealists and the Abstractionists. A cohesive tie was discovered between image and imageless painting. Through comparison of the artists used as reference and the confirming series of paintings, this thesis was successfully completed.

In this essay eroticism will be examined as it appears in some twentieth century representational styles. The decision to concentrate on the representational styles is based on the fact that eroticism is by nature incompatible with the non-representational or non-objective movements in art. This incompatibility is rooted in the knowledge that eroticism is intrinsically and fundamentally a human experience and could therefore find expression only in an art which is concerned with human experience, i.e. experiences which refer to man, his nature and his relation to Nature. It would be oversimplified and grossly inaccurate to equate the nonrepresentational with the abstract, abstraction being an element present in all art to a greater or lesser degree. However, when abstraction has reached the stage where it can define its aims, as, in the words of Kandinsky, "widening the separation between the domain of art and the domain of Nature", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 1) then it may also approach the realm of the non-representational. When Michel Seupher states, "I call abstract art all art that does not recall or evoke reality", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 136) abstract and nonrepresentational art becomes fused into an inseparable unity. Erotic expression will then be incompatible with this degree of abstraction. Intro., p. 1.