Word: mednikoff
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...Grace Pailthorpe is tall. Mr. Reuben Mednikoff is small. Dr. Pailthorpe is the daughter of a stockbroker. Mr. Mednikoff is the son of a peasant. She is 48, he is 32; she a doctor, he a commercial artist. She has spent some time bushwhacking in New Zealand; he has spent much of his brushwielding in London. Both have bright eyes, great energy, and perfectly terrific subconscious minds. Fate threw them together at a party five years ago, and they have been working together ever since on the Cornwall coast. Last week the fruit of those years-65 of the goofiest...
...course of experiments on themselves and each other, Pailthorpe and Mednikoff found they could let their subconscious minds range up near the level of conscious, so that the two intermingled. Many a childhood memory, wish, fear broke through and expressed itself-to the immense comfort of Dr. Pailthorpe's and Mr. Mednikoff's psyches. They were doing in their own way what psychiatrists do in psychoanalysis. Sometimes they happily babbled babytalk. Sometimes they wrote infantile verse. But most of the time they painted surrealist child-paintings...
From their experience grew the Pailthorpe-Mednikoff Theory, about which they hope to write a book if the show earns them enough money. Surrealist painting, they say, affords a very effective sort of psychotherapy. They believe childhood quirks, resulting in adulthood's maladjustments, can be cleared away if the subconscious mind paints them through symbols of its choice...
...Pailthorpe-Mednikoff canvases were filled with these symbols. Some of them, such as safety pins, wheels and houses, were easily recognizable as childish carryovers. Others were less simple. Dr. Pailthorpe and Mr. Mednikoff were anxious to explain that this cockscomb meant that the little boy had killed his mother, and that that tree represented father chasing him around behind the house. Some of the symbols were obviously adult, obviously sexual...
...critics thought some of Mr. Mednikoff's work, such as Little Nigger Boys Don't Tell Lies (see cut), beautifully painted. But neurologists and psychiatrists were considerably more dubious of the value of self-administered surrealistic psychotherapy...
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