Abstract expressionism in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The newer research tends to put the exile-surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in the position of the artist and theoretician who fostered the theory of the viewer-dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine "DYN". Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics, as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of
Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle of God. In 1805, Goethe saw a copy of this portrait in the museum at Leipzig and described it as of "inestimable value." According to Lawrence Gowing, who calls this "the most French of all his pictures", the "Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle" is singular among Dürer's paintings as "the touch is freer and color more iridescent than in any other picture one remembers". Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle (or "Eryngium") is an oil painting on parchment pasted on canvas by German artist Albrecht Dürer. Painted in 1493, it