| Max Ernst (1891-1976) | ||
| Postershop
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Ernst never attended art
school; he studied philosophy and psychiatry at the University of Bonn. He was wounded in
the head twice (gun recoil; mule kick) during his four-year service in W.W.I. He was also
near court-martial many times because of his insubordination. He worked with the Dada movement after the war and then was instrumental in the development of Surrealism. In keeping the refusal of Surrealists to abide by any accepted codes of conduct or morality, he left his own wife and moved in with a poet (Paul Eluard: "Elephants are contagious") and his wife, Gala. (Gala later became the wife of Salvadore Dali.) Ernst and fellow Surrealists enjoyed playing a game they called "exquisite corpses." The verbal version was played by assigning a part of a sentence (subject, verb, adverb, adjective, object...) to various participants. (The name comes from the result of the first game: "The exquisite/corpse/shall drink/the bubbling wine.") The visual version involved one person starting a drawing and then folding that part under so the next person could continue without being able to see the previous part(s). When Ernst helped design stage sets for a production of Romeo and Juliet, Andre Breton and other Surrealists protested by interrupting the opening performance with insults, whistles and noisemakers. He married Peggy Guggenheim in 1942. The first challenge for surrealist artists was initiating a work without interference from the conscious minds. Ernst developed two methods for starting paintings - "frottage" (rubbing): rubbing textured object such as driftwood with lead pencil and then rubbing a blank canvas over its surface to pick up texture. "decalcomania": two canvases crudely slathered with paint and pressed together then pulled apart. He treated painting as a living thing; the result depended on artist's mood (playful, angry, savage).
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Ernst
started pictures by rubbing the canvas earnestly.