Hermann Landshoff, “Max Ernst at Peggy Guggenheim’s Home”, New York, 1942, Silver Gelatin Print
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Tag: max ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst, “My Friend Pierrot”, 1973-1974, Oil on Canvas, Guggenheim Museum
Even as an octogenarian, Max Ernst continued to work, and kept busy on lithographs, collages and paintings. This is one of his final three paintings before his death in Paris on April 1st, 1976.
Max Ernst
Max Ernst, “Naissance d’une Galaxie (Birth of a Galaxy)”, Oil on Canvas, 1969, Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, Switzerland
Closely associated with Surrealism and Dada, Max Ernst made paintings, sculptures, and prints depicting fantastic, nightmarish images that often made reference to anxieties originating in childhood. Ernst demonstrated a profound interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which is apparent in his exploration of Automatism and his invention of the Frottage technique.
The artist’s psychoanalytic leanings are evident in his iconic 1923 work “Pietà”, or “Revolution by Night”, in which Ernst substitutes the image of Mary cradling the body of Christ with a depiction of the artist himself held by his father. Much of the artist’s work defied societal norms, Christian morality, and the aesthetic standards of Western academic art.
Max Ernst painted “Birth of a Galaxy” in Paris during his second French period.
Max Ernst
Max Ernst, “Deux Oiseaux (Two Birds)”, Colour Lithograph, 1975
Max Ernst was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. He inspired in Max a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max to take up painting himself.
In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting that year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle, and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist.
In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work was exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.
Max Ernst
Max Ernst, “Euclid”, 1945, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 57.5 cm, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
In Max Ernst’s 1945 “Euclid”, a surrealist portrait of the ancient Geometer is presented in abstract form with the figure’s head rendered as a geometric solid, resembling a pyramid. The wise man is clad in noble, velvet clothes, rendered using the decalcomania technique, and adorned with two white roses. He is surrounded by a geometric background of overlapping planes, intersecting straight lines and rhodonea – like curves, some of which extend over its face, contributing to the formation of its features. His owl – like eyes, formed on an inverted antefix with the design of the ancient Greek anthemion ornament, glow bright yellow betraying intense intellectual activity.