Light
Millennium #15 Issue, May 2005
Max
Ernst: A Retrospective
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Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
The Robing of the Bride, 1940
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (The Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris |
Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
Celebes, 1921
Tate Modern, London
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris |
Exhibition
dates: April 7 - July 10, 2005
At the Metropolitan
Museum of Art - New York City
The
much-anticipated exhibition Max Ernst: A Retrospective,
the first major U.S. survey of the artist's work in 30
years, is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since
April 7, 2005. Ernst (1891-1976) was a founding member
of the Dada and Surrealist movements in Europe and was
one of the most ingenious artists of the 20th century.
The exhibition will remain on view through July 10,
2005.
Ernst's
paintings and collages, steeped in Freudian metaphor,
private mythology, and childhood memories, are regarded
as icons of Surrealist art. With the exception of Picasso,
few artists have played such a decisive role in the invention
of modern techniques and styles. Through some 175 works
- including his most important paintings, celebrated collages,
frottages, drawings, sculptures, and illustrated books,
lent from private and public collections in Europe and
the United States - the exhibition explores Ernst's stylistic,
technical, and thematic achievements.
Max
Ernst: A Retrospective also traces the artist's peripatetic
career, which began in Germany before World War I, shifted
to France between the wars, moved to the United States
during World War II, and concluded in France. The exhibition
is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only
venue.
Philippe
de Montebello,
Director of the Metropolitan Museum, stated: "While
the importance of Max Ernst in the history of Dada and
Surrealism has been recognized worldwide, the spectrum
of Ernst's work - along with its inventiveness - has been
less well-known in the United States in recent years.
The Metropolitan's upcoming exhibition should redress
this. As the first major survey of the artist's career
in this country in three decades, Max Ernst: A Retrospective
mirrors the extraordinary variety of Ernst's oeuvre and
has included some of his most celebrated works from the
different periods of his life."
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Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before
Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist, 1926
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris |
Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
Ubu Imperator, 1923
Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art
Moderne, Paris
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris |
Exhibition
Overview
Ernst's
famous proto-Surrealist paintings from the period of evolution
from Dada into Surrealism are among the highlights featured
in the exhibition. Based on the method of collage, they
are built up of separate elements that create strange
images, combining threat, comedy, and dream. Most famous
among them are the iconic paintings created between 1921
and 1923, including Celebes (1921, Tate Modern,
London), in which a hulking, horned elephantine creature,
part machine and part beast, stands on a vast plain against
a cloudy sky, gazing at a headless female nude. In Ubu
Imperator (1923, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée
National d'Art Moderne, Paris), an anthropomorphic top
dances in a vast empty landscape. Such works might be
said to capture early on the Surrealist notion of estrangement.
Other
works from this period deal with themes of blindness and
entrapment. In Saint Cecilia (1923, Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart), the patron saint of music and the blind is
encased in a structure that covers her eyes and constricts
her entire body, save her arms, which are outstretched
to play an invisible keyboard. In The Wavering Woman (1923,
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), a
large creature that could be either human or an automaton
is engulfed by an electrical charge. In Oedipus Rex (1922,
Private collection), male fingers, pierced by a mechanical
device, emerge through an open square in an enclosed brick
structure and balance above the heads of two trapped bird-like
creatures.
Ernst's
great technical refinement is on display in A Night
of Love (1927, Private collection). The artist dipped
strings of various strengths and widths in paint and then
dropped them onto the canvas. From the remaining traces
of these strings, he created the image of a couple wrapped
in a starry night sky.
Particularly
significant are the artist's collage novels, narratives
made up of disparate images culled from 19th-century engravings
and combined in unsettling compositions. Among the novels
included in the exhibition are La Femme 100 têtes
(1929, The Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library),
Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel
(1930, Collection Timothy Baum, New York), and Une
semaine de bonté; (1934, The Spencer Collection,
The New York Public Library).
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Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
The Fireside Angel, 1937
Private collection
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris
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The
artist's subsequent works incorporate the techniques of
frottage (making a rubbing from a textured surface), grattage
(frottage applied to painting), and decalcomania (manipulation
of a still wet painting by pressing a second surface against
it and then pulling it away). In the paintings, Ernst
explores the themes of the forest and the ruined city,
which poignantly foreshadow the political storm clouds
gathering over Europe. For example, in The Fireside
Angel (1937, Private collection), Ernst reacts directly
to the menacing rise of Fascism.
Foreboding
and memory characterize many of the remarkable paintings
created by the artist during his time in the United States,
from 1941 to 1953. The large-scale Vox Angelica
(1943, Private collection) can be interpreted today as
a manifesto on European art in exile, with its evocation
of the life that had to be left behind when artists fled
the advance of the war.
About
the Artist
Max
Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Brühl, a small
German town located near the Rhine River between Bonn
and Cologne. His father, Philipp Ernst, a devout Catholic
and an academic painter, was a teacher at a school for
the deaf. Max Ernst, an avid reader, studied philosophy,
history of art, literature, and psychology at the University
of Bonn from 1909 to 1914. Highly intelligent and imaginative,
he initially began painting in a naïve Expressionist
style that mingled aspects of Cubism with Futurism.
From
1914 to 1917, during World War I, Ernst served in the
German army on both the Western and Eastern fronts. He
continued painting in his earlier style until the summer
of 1919, when he saw the work of Giorgio de Chirico
reproduced in the magazine Valori Plastici. This
encounter with the melancholy, magical, and empty cityscapes
of the Italian artist proved decisive for Ernst's later
artistic development, as he became one of the most enthusiastic
leaders of the Dada movement in Cologne. Before long,
his remarkable Dada collages attracted the attention of
the French poets and writers André Breton, Louis
Aragon, and Paul Eluard in Paris, who saw in
these works analogies to their own poetic experiments.
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Max
Ernst (French, born Germany, 18911976)
Vox Angelica, 1943
Private collection
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris
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In
1921, Breton organized an exhibition of Ernst's Dada collages
in Paris, and in 1922, Ernst moved to the French capital,
never to work again in his native country. Three years
later, in 1924, the 33-year-old artist became one of the
founding members of the Surrealist group. The proto-Surrealist
paintings that he created between 1921 and 1923, first
in Cologne and later in Paris, are now regarded as signature
works of the movement. Composed of illusionistic but irrational
scenes, they evoke dreams and hallucinations but defy
interpretation. These powerful images later influenced
the early works of Tanguy, Masson, Magritte, and
Dalí among others.
The
artist's collages are even more representative of the
Surrealist movement. In them, Ernst combined cutout details
from a variety of sources, including 19th-century engravings
from popular novels and mail-order catalogues, and botanical
and scientific prints from teaching-aid catalogues. These
transformed images are fantastic, magical, sometimes disquieting,
and always surprising.
In
1941, escaping the Nazi threat in Europe, Max Ernst arrived
in the United States. First in New York, and later in
Sedona, Arizona, he created remarkable paintings and sculptures.
In 1953, Ernst returned permanently to Europe, and died
in Paris in 1976, one night before his 85th birthday.
A museum devoted to the artist's life and work, the
Max Ernst Museum, is scheduled to open in his hometown
of Brühl, Germany, on September 3, 2005.
Max
Ernst: A Retrospective has been organized by Werner Spies,
the distinguished Max Ernst scholar, and Sabine Rewald,
Curator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and
Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Conservation
aspects of the works on paper in the exhibition were undertaken
by the Museum’s Department of Paper Conservation.
Please
visit for the museum hours or more information:
http://www.metmuseum.org
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Light Millennium #15 Issue, May 2005
- http://www.lightmillennium.org
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