Cirlot biography and

A Dictionary of Symbols: Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Classic Study of Symbols Gets Republished in a Beautiful, Expanded Edition

How, exact­ly, does one go about mak­ing a glob­al dic­tio­nary of sym­bols? It is a Her­culean task, one few schol­ars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philo­log­i­cal approach that gath­ers and com­pares arti­facts from every cul­ture under­went a cor­rec­tion: No one per­son can have the exper­tise to cov­er every­thing. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremen­dous cre­ative val­ue. Such explo­rations bring us clos­er to what makes humans the same the world over: our pro­duc­tive imag­i­na­tions and the arche­typ­al well­spring of images that guide us through the unknown.

When Span­ish poet, crit­ic, trans­la­tor, and musi­col­o­gist Juan Eduar­do Cir­lot began his 1958 Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writ­ing against a cur­rent of pos­i­tivism that deval­ued the sym­bol­ic.

Cir­lot quotes Jung in his intro­duc­tion: “For the mod­ern mind, analo­gies… are noth­ing but self-evi­de

Juan Eduardo Cirlot facts for kids

Juan Eduardo Cirlot Laporta (9 April 1916 – 11 May 1973) was a Spanish poet, art critic, hermeneutist, mythologist, and musician.

Biography

Cirlot was born in Barcelona to Juan Cirlot and Maria Laporta. There he matriculated high school from the College of the Jesuits and worked in a customs agency and the Banco Hispanoamericano while also studying music.

In 1937, he was mobilized to fight for the Second Spanish Republic. In early 1940, he was mobilized again, but this time by the pro-Franco side. He was in Zaragoza until 1943; there he frequented the city's intellectual and artistic circles and associated with the painter Alfonso Buñuel—brother of Luis Buñuel—with whom he translated the poems of Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud. During this period, he read many avant-garde art books and magazines.

In the summer of 1943, he returned to Barcelona to work in the Banco Hispanoamericano. He met novelist Benítez de Castro, who introduced him in the media as an art critic. On 11 August 1947, he married Gloria Valenzuela, then began

Lourdes Cirlot

Lourdes Cirlot Valenzuela (born 1949) is a Spanish art theorist, art historian and researcher, whose work highlights diverse aspects of 20th and 21st century art. She has published books about Avant-garde art and numerous papers in journals and anthologies.[1]

Background

Cirlot is the daughter of the spanish poet and art critic Juan Eduardo Cirlot and the sister of the scholar Victoria Cirlot. In November 2011, the two sisters collaborated on the exhibitions El Mundo de Juan Eduardo Cirlot, presented in the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno[2] and Juan Eduardo Cirlot, The Imaginary Room, presented in Arts Santa Mónica.[3]

Cirlot graduated from the faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona (1973) and then obtained a Ph.D. in Art History from the same university (1980).[4] She began her teaching career in the Department of History of Art of the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona in 1974.[5]

In 1997, she became a professor of History of Art in

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