Word: ernste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Royal Swedish Academy yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Richard R. Ernst of Switzerland and the Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes of France...
...technical question of who "invented" collage fades to unimportance when you look at what Ernst did with it. Some Surrealist collages look as dated as Victorian screens, but his tiny, rigorous visions never do. By making realities collide, he slips you into a parallel world whose features are both precise and ineffably odd, where things are not what they seem. Ernst loved images that enumerated things: mechanical and scientific drawing, illustrations from 1900 boulevardier magazines, old catalogs. Their factual neutrality made their paradoxes weirder. Sometimes this serves mainly lyrical ends, as in the Klee-like plant-personages that rear...
...Ernst's work was continuously open to chance. The arresting drawings of his 1925 Natural History were made by laying sheets of paper on the wooden floor of his hotel room in a French seaside town and going over them with the (paternal?) soft pencil; the resulting images, altered and edited, received the name frottages, or rubbings. The name of the town, by an exquisite coincidence, was Pornic...
...desire to freeze accident remained with Ernst until the end of his life. After he escaped from Europe to America in 1941 -- his ticket was paid by Peggy Guggenheim, who was sexually obsessed by Ernst -- he lived for some years in Arizona, whose vast skies and mesas repeated the visions inscribed in certain Ernsts of the '30s like The Petrified City. There he made paintings by swinging a can with a hole in it over a canvas; these rhythmical dribbles were seen by Jackson Pollock...
...cannot make as strong a case for the late as for the early Ernst. Some of the sculpture of his post-1939 years was remarkable -- especially the big totemic Capricorn, 1948 -- but his apocalyptic paintings, like the vision of creepy, fungal disaster recorded in Europe After the Rain, 1940-42, look like sci-fi cliche. By the '50s he was thinking illustratively rather than pictorially. To some extent he always had, but now the visions were more diffuse, and the paintings of his last decade (he died in 1976) are feebly hermetic. No matter. He was always a painter...