Word: ernste
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Other visions were apparently acquired from emotional events and trying circumstances in his life. His father was stern and autocratic. When young Ernst was only 14, his pet cockatoo died. The same day, almost to the hour, his favorite younger sister was born. Thereafter, Ernst's subconscious apparently kept mixing the images of a bird as hope, maybe with sex and therefore regeneration; of father as creator and destroyer; and of the whole world as both a dreadful and exciting place...
During a later illness, Ernst remembers, he stared at the wood flooring and ended up discovering a new painting technique that he called "frottage." He took paper and pencil, laid them over the textured surface, and scribbled away -as many a child has done over a penny on many a boring day. Allied to this was Ernst's use of paint sponged and knifed on a canvas, with the images it suggested later sharpened with a brush. Figure-Mythological Woman was produced in just such...
Pedigree. Ernst went to the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, and psychiatry at a time, 1909, when the subject was barely acknowledged as a discipline. After serving in the German artillery in World War I, he continued painting, and eventually reached Paris at a time when Dada was in full swing and Surrealism was about to be born. One purpose of Dada was to negate everything that art had stood for in the past. Yet Ernst's love of images that rise from chance blots has a pedigree that goes back to Leonardo, who spoke of finding battle scenes...
Eventually Ernst migrated back to Europe and a small house in the south of France, where he is busy doing lithographs and engravings. One of his better recent works is a collage of the church St. Sulpice in Paris, complete with that insistent bird...
What has always rescued Ernst from the programmatic side of surrealism is that he has an incredible sense of abstract design and (in his later years) a total freedom from meticulous realistic detail. If one can judge from this show, Ernst has recovered in old age the ebullience that can make him imagine an abstract sun setting over an abstract Arizona desert, re-create from memory a fine old image of Adam and Eve, or reduce a bird to one aggressive beak above a red colored square. He may not be getting better but it is clear that, even past...