Word: ernste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every artist needs some source of inspiration. Max Ernst, the lyric German subversive who was born 100 years ago, had one that carried him through most of his life. He hated his father, a pious Catholic art teacher who worked in a school for deaf and mute children in a small forest town south of Cologne. Indeed, Ernst wanted to kill Papa and what he thought he represented: the authority of age, religion, the state and the image...
...surprising, despicable -- not a bad thumbnail note for Ernst's own art, especially as seen by others. We have reason to thank the large soft pencil of the man with the mustache. Ernst was not a great formal artist, not by a very long chalk. But in the 1920s and '30s especially, he was a brilliant maker of images. Their strength and edginess radiate like new in the centenary Ernst exhibit, organized by art historian Werner Spies, which is at London's Tate Gallery this month and moves in mid-May to Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie. Long after the art movements...
...means for doing so was collage, which means simply "gluing." Ernst cut photos and engravings from magazines, catalogs, albums, marrying things that / didn't belong together. Collage was a static relative of film cutting, then in its infancy. Seventy years later, America sees in collage because it grew up spinning the TV dial. No such fragmentation of images was built into the culture of France or Germany in the 1920s. The relations between image and thing seemed solid. Here was something to overturn, and collage was the lever. Ernst fell on the common vein of reproductory images like a miner...
Essentially untrained as a painter, he fell in with the German Expressionists in 1910-12 by sheer brightness of character. He knew August Macke, whose ideas about pantheistic nature were to reverberate in Ernst's work right up to its end. Macke was killed in the trenches. Ernst survived the war and emerged from its troglodytic lunacy with a deep hatred of Kaiser and country...
...first collage painting, Celebes, 1921, is one of his funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman in the foreground...