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October Books
Belleza Compulsiva
El surrealismo ha sido generalmente visto tal como su fundador, André Bretón, quiso que se lo viera: como un movimiento de amor y liberación. En Belleza compulsiva Hal Foster, uno de los más brillantes pensadores y teóricos del arte, analiza con extraordinaria lucidez el corazón mismo del surrealismo y lo hace desde el lado más oscuro de aquella singular vanguardia.
400 pages
First published January 1, 1993
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396 people want to read
About the author
Hal Foster
313 books146 followersHal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.
Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.
Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 18, 2026
Studio reading got some good quotes and interesting artists from it
October 8, 2007
I learned (again) that love is homesickness.
October 11, 2025
sudden fear in the forest of symbols.
attempts to integrate art and life
dream interpretation
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain
point o f the mind at which life and death, the real and the
imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable,
high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
new conception of art: the image as an enigmatic
trace o f a traumatic experience and/or fantasy, ambiguous in its curative
and destructive effects.
Love is homesickness
Treatment at these
institutions included free association and dream interpretation, the very
techniques that inspired the automatist devices o f early surrealism.
why would the little boy symbolically repeat an event,that was precisely not pleasant?
Inquiry: one lives, one dies. What is the role o f will in all this?
It seems that one kills oneself as one dreams. It is not a moral
question that we pose: is suicide a s o lu tio n ? Suicide
is a badly conceived word; the one who kills is not identical to the one
who is killed.
death is a dissociative principle
passive “ spectator” o f his own work, or
an “ agonized witness” o f his own life.
confusion between internal impulse
and external sign;
confusion: the compulsion to
repeat. a real event that produces an unconscious effect.
repetition that is regressive, generally defusive, even deadly
Compulsive beauty is like a train . . .
the mannequin, doll, or dummy as a disguised self-portrait,
concerned to work over cathected memories: he too restages primal fantasies
and/or traumatic events concerning identity, difference, and sexuality
In
“Memories o f the Doll Theme,” the text that introduces the first doll
his photographs
often present both poupees in scenes evocative o f sex as well as death
the first doll as a way to recover “ the enchanted garden” o f childhood
mechanism o f the poupee: its interior is filled with
miniature panoramas intended “ to pluck away the secret thoughts o f the
little girls.”
the dolls are
“ captured” by his look, by his grasp. How are we to understand this? doll suggests an obsessive fragmentation o f a female figure
doll is “ a
series o f endless anagrams”
desire o f children to “ see the soul o f their toys” as a
“ first metaphysical tendency,” whose failure is “ the beginning o f melancholy and
Gloom”
manipulates the
dolls as i f to ascertain the signs o f difference and the mechanics o f b irth. in his
destruction o f the dolls he expresses a self-destructive impulse.
marks the dolls, many o f which read simultaneously as a
corpse and a corps morcele
perversion o f the dolls is precisely a turning away from the
father,
attempts to integrate art and life
dream interpretation
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain
point o f the mind at which life and death, the real and the
imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable,
high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
new conception of art: the image as an enigmatic
trace o f a traumatic experience and/or fantasy, ambiguous in its curative
and destructive effects.
Love is homesickness
Treatment at these
institutions included free association and dream interpretation, the very
techniques that inspired the automatist devices o f early surrealism.
why would the little boy symbolically repeat an event,that was precisely not pleasant?
Inquiry: one lives, one dies. What is the role o f will in all this?
It seems that one kills oneself as one dreams. It is not a moral
question that we pose: is suicide a s o lu tio n ? Suicide
is a badly conceived word; the one who kills is not identical to the one
who is killed.
death is a dissociative principle
passive “ spectator” o f his own work, or
an “ agonized witness” o f his own life.
confusion between internal impulse
and external sign;
confusion: the compulsion to
repeat. a real event that produces an unconscious effect.
repetition that is regressive, generally defusive, even deadly
Compulsive beauty is like a train . . .
the mannequin, doll, or dummy as a disguised self-portrait,
concerned to work over cathected memories: he too restages primal fantasies
and/or traumatic events concerning identity, difference, and sexuality
In
“Memories o f the Doll Theme,” the text that introduces the first doll
his photographs
often present both poupees in scenes evocative o f sex as well as death
the first doll as a way to recover “ the enchanted garden” o f childhood
mechanism o f the poupee: its interior is filled with
miniature panoramas intended “ to pluck away the secret thoughts o f the
little girls.”
the dolls are
“ captured” by his look, by his grasp. How are we to understand this? doll suggests an obsessive fragmentation o f a female figure
doll is “ a
series o f endless anagrams”
desire o f children to “ see the soul o f their toys” as a
“ first metaphysical tendency,” whose failure is “ the beginning o f melancholy and
Gloom”
manipulates the
dolls as i f to ascertain the signs o f difference and the mechanics o f b irth. in his
destruction o f the dolls he expresses a self-destructive impulse.
marks the dolls, many o f which read simultaneously as a
corpse and a corps morcele
perversion o f the dolls is precisely a turning away from the
father,
September 11, 2012
since i bought this book in the Dean Gallery bookshop in 2000 it has been one of my essential "to hand" books on surrealism. deftly exploring the Freudian dimension of the work of (pre WW2) surrealists, it weaves an illuminating web of cultural and poetic resonances around the work of Ernst, Breton, Bellmer, et al. very highly recommended (if you're into surrealism and/or psychoanalysis)
June 5, 2008
Sometimes I really hate Hal Foster, but that's why I love him.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews