the clarity of colour and exactness of measurement are the opposite of incoherence and vagueness… One must imagine everything in the world to be a riddle. (de Chirico)
Surrealism
Surrealism, like Futurism and Dada, was a lifestyle. In addition to Constructivism and expressive painting, it has influenced the art of the western world to this day. Surrealism made use of the experiences of the others in the spheres of unsettling dream reality and the unconscious. At first, it was the writers Paul Éluard and André Breton, who, having joined together in 1921 in order to enrich their art, sought to stage dreams, visions, uncontrolled associations and experiences of intoxication. It was known that in the 19th century, writers like Stéphane Mallarmé used drugs to broaden their senses in order to open up new dimensions for their writing.
André Breton was originally a neurologist. Therefore, in 1922 he visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna in order to familiarise himself with Freudian psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. In 1924 he published the manifesto, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture. In it he states:
Surrealism is a purely psychological automatism through which one verbally, in written form or by other means, seeks to express the true process of thinking. A dictation of thought, without any of the controlling influences of reason and outside considerations such as ethics or aesthetics… Surrealism rests upon the belief in a higher reality of certain forms of associations that have until today been neglected and upon the omnipotence of the dream and non-utilitarian thought play.
Breton described the first attempts at automatic writing – sentences and words that arose without any control from the subconscious. Primarily, young writers like René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon concerned themselves with ‘psychological automatism’ and with the free associations of thoughts and words. The result was: ‘an astounding eloquence, great feeling, a great wealth of images.’
In Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, which appeared in 1928 in Paris, he wrote about catalysts that were helpful in approaching invisible phenomenon. It is essential to observe the inference points of the positive and magical world with a divining rod. He went on to describe the collages of Max Ernst as energetically active objects in which past associations may pose problems in the new interaction with one another. In his collages, Max Ernst undertook an experiment by taking individual objects, cut outs of old woodprints for example, and placing them in a new reference system. The cut out had broken with the old context. The parts were now integrated into new reference points.
In an unreal manner, but still on the level of the real… he could observe how these beings stood across from one another with a hostile attitude and were frightened by the company in which they found themselves. ‘Is it then so astonishing,’ Breton asked further, ‘that the horror which overtakes things would seep into us, would also overwhelm us, when we fall into an Ernst-like dream… ’
And Max Ernst defined his collages as follows:
The collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the random or artificially induced meeting of two or more alien realities at an apparently inopportune level – and poetry is the spark that arks over when these realities approach each other.
For Max Ernst, collage was the ‘alchemy of visual imagination and the wonder of the total reordering of beings and objects.’ Similar to Duchamp’s readymades, objects in Ernst collages lose their original identity through systematic arrangement.
Max Ernst was not an artist of unconscious actions. He knew the mechanisms of dreams and the unconscious and consciously played with them. He inserted historical references, artistic cross-references and psychological hints into a painting using tangible materials or other newly found techniques. He left room for chance. The results were ambiguous.
Max Ernst, Au Rendez-vous des Amis, 1922.
Oil on canvas, 130 × 195 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Max Ernst, The Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus BeforeThree Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the Artist, 1926.
Oil on canvas, 196 × 130 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Max Ernst was in military service until 1918. ‘Max Ernst died on 1 August 1914. He returned to life on the 11 November 1918, back to life as a young man who wanted to become a magician and the myth of his time.’ He started with Dada in Cologne. At the Hans Goltz gallery in Munich, he came across a copy of the Italian magazine Valori Plastici. In this brownish printing, the works of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico were depicted. These metaphysical cityscapes and the absurd, random perspectives, which the Cubists had just abandoned, fascinated him and led him in 1919 to create the portfolio Fiat Modes. He dedicated it to de Chirico. Mannequins or human beings that look like mannequins play the part. Lettering, using Dadaistic wordplay, increases the confusion. Max Ernst joined the incompatible together, just as one finds it in his later collages.
The Rendezvous of Friends serves as a platform painting for the forming Surrealist group. Painted in December 1922, it shows (as one can read on the scroll on the bottom right corner of the painting): 1 René Crevel, 2 Philippe Soulpault, 3 Arp, 4 Max Ernst, 5 Max Morise, 6 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 7 Raphael, 8 Théodore Fraenkel, 9 Paul Éluard, 10 Jean Paulhan, 11 Benjamin Péret, 12 Louis Aragon, 13 André Breton, 14 Baargeld, 15 Giorgio de Chirico, 16 Gala Éluard and 17 Robert Desnos. Tzara and Picabia from the Dada era are missing. Instead, he inserted the already deceased ancestors of Surrealism into the painting. Ernst put himself in the lap of Dostoyevsky, whose literary works had anticipated the new developments in psychology.
Along with the portraits Breton and Éluard, in 1926 Max Ernst composed a further painting, Die Jungfrau Maria verhaut den Menschensohn vor drei Zeugen, A. B., P. E. und den Maler (The Virgin Mary Spanks the Baby Jesus in front of Three Witnesses, A.B, P. E. and the Painter). When he first exhibited the work at the Parisian Salon des Indépendents, it drew a great deal of attention and soon thereafter created a scandal at the Secession exhibition at the Cologne Kunsterverein. He was accused of blasphemy. The archbishop of Cologne had the painting removed. Catholic notables, including his own father, condemned the painting. Max Ernst himself was amused by it. Years before in 1920, at the first Dada event in Cologne with Hans Arp, Theodor Baargeld, and Max Ernst, there had already been some controversy. This started from the fact that the entrance to the exhibition was through the lavatory at the Winter brewery. Philipp Ernst, a hobby painter and teacher for the deaf, had once painted his son, Ernst, as the baby Jesus in a painting. Now that Max Ernst had become familiar with the writings of Sigmund Freud, he ascribed an Oedipal aspect to his painting. The boy’s member finds itself on the mother’s lap. With his right hand, the boy reaches for a pleat that suggests a vagina. Such incestuous behaviour ought to be punished. This was passionately discussed among Max Ernst’s circle of friends. Viewing the scene through the window in the background are three voyeurs, Max Ernst himself and his friends, the French poet André Breton, and Paul Éluard, the gods of Surrealism.
Paying homage to psychological automatism, the Surrealist manifesto included a guide to automatic writing. Max Ernst wanted to reply to the writers with the ‘automatic painting’ of equal standing. He wanted give wings to his own meditative and hallucinatory powers. He randomly put sheets of paper on some floorboards, did rubbings of the wood with a soft pencil and was astounded by their darkness and delicate semidarkness. He was surprised by the sudden intensification of his visions when contemplating the rubbings. In the same manner, he experimented with a whole range of materials. Frottage was born. The first 34 pencil frottages, titled Histoire Naturelle, appeared in 1926.
The frottage technique revealed itself to be the equivalent to automatic writing. Max Ernst remarked that with the frottage technique, all the conscious influences such as reason and taste were switched off. Moreover, the active participation of the author, in this case the artist, was reduced to a minimum. The sketches were the result of suggestions and transmutations that spontaneously reveal themselves, corresponding to hypnotic visions. The character of the materials in question, for example wood, is lost. In 1925, Max Ernst began experiments with