Max Ernst: 2

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution", Part 1.

Robert Motherwell

Motherwell was perhaps the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists; he was also their intellectual light, the most educated member of the group, the best travelled and most independent and the artist who was the most connected to the old European avant-garde. He immersed himself in modernist tradition. He especially loved French culture: I imaged that he smoked Gauloises (he did not, he liked the blue label and used it in his collages); he loved French literature: Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Proust and Baudelaire. His contact with surrealism was very important because it prompted Motherwell to paint and involve himself in developing his own for of automatic drawing and painting exercises, firstly with the artist Matta and then with Jackson Pollock.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 1953-54.

Although an abstract painter, Motherwell’s work “constantly reaches out into life”: his Elegies
working as “general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation" (Lynton, N., 2003 p. 243).

Iberia No. 18, 1958

In Plato's Cave No. 1 1972

Many of Motherwell's paintings rely on oppositions. He uses "the polarity between amphousness and geometry" to evoke "both opposition and ultimate harmony, as between nature and culture, emptiness thought, passivity and action- and on a larger scale, between chaos and cosmos" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 26-27). Paintings like Plato's Cave "seem to set emptiness against the mark of man (sic) in a way that recalls the oldest paintings known, those on the walls of prehistoric caves, especially the mysterious and moving pictographs on the walls of Lascaux and Altmira" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 27).

Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue 1974

Paintings like Summer Open are a manifestation of Motherwell's engagement with Matisse and matisse at his most sensual. The blue seems to reflect the light of Collioure, but a Collioure that this now a lost paradise, part of a Mediterranean culture that has vanished. Is it a nostalgic longing that we see in some of Motherwell's pieces?

Sources:

Flam, J., (1991) Motherwell, London and New York: Phaidon

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg Untitled (Glossy Black Painting), ca. 1951; painting; oil and paper on canvas.

The painting featured above is very similar to the pieces that I have been producing. However the aims of Rauschenberg's approach or at least some of the the results may be different. These early fifties pieces have influenced the making of the backgrounds to may digital imagery.

Retroactive I 1964

Kite 1963

The above pictures Kite 1963 and Retroactive I 1964 are Rauschenberg's view of the landscape of media. He essentially deals with glut: mass communication, mass media, and the noise of radio, cinema and television: the city full of signs: billboards, electronic data streams and the world of traffic and congestion. The idea of glut in the 1960s and in the 1980s seems miniscule in comparison with the glut of the net and the multi channels available to us: Google, MySpace, Facebook, Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and whatever else exists.

What is interesting about these two works is that they seem to excavate the whole histories of media. Robert Hughes (1980 & 1991, pp. 345-6) has suggested that Retroactive showed how Rauschenberg like to excavate histories within a single image. The “red patch in the bottom right corner… is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili”, which Rauschenberg found in life magazine. According to Hughes Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. “Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So…” according to Hughes “the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for Carmine in Florence” (Hughes p. 346).



Above: Masaccio’s fresco from The Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence

Hughes, R. (1991) The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change London: Thames and Hudson.

Max Ernst

A quick note about Surrealism and connected terminology: a revolutionary movement and a mode of representation in painting sculpture, film and literature. Surrealists revolted against social and artistic conventions. To do this they exploited the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleeping and waking, and of natural or artificially induced hallucinations. The surrealists produced works that included dreamlike and nightmarish sequences and the juxtaposition of unrelated objects. However, surrealistic or the surreal are now words often used in a loose sense to refer (one may argue wrongly) to any bizarre imaginative effect. There are many references to surrealism in cyberspace discourse. I must reread Richard Coyne’s book Technoromanticism.

Automatism: a term devised I think by Andre Breton to describe a type of writing, but in the visual arts it is non-structured drawing or doodling (usually a form of freehand abstraction), with eyes and (as far as possible) the mind closed, was believed by surrealists to be a means of tapping into the creative powers of the unconscious.


Frottage: The technique of frottage was developed by Max Ernst in 1924 & 1925. Frottage was the technique of taking a rubbing from a textured surface by placing a piece of paper over it, and shading with a soft crayon or pencil so that an impression appears on the surface.



From the Natural History series In the Stable of Sphinx 1925




From the Natural History series Leaf Customs 1925



Grattage (also referred to raclage by the Phaedon Dictionary of Surrealism.): a technique where layers of paint are applied on a basic surface made uneven by objects laid under it, usually with a light background, and then, half random, half consciously scratched off again in raised places.



Vision induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte St. Denis. 1927

The Horde 1927

Petrified Forest 1927

Cage, Forrest and Black Sun 1927

Wallpaper

No flowers please: wallpaper exhibition exposes the dark side of the home Crime scenes, school bullies and genitalia feature in first UK exhibition of medium:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/06/wallpaper-exhibition-manchester

Civilisation 9: The Pursuit of Happiness: 5

  

This study of pleasure in the 18^th Century moves now to Mozart. One must remember however, to paraphrase the words of Robert Hughes, in the 18th Century the pleasure principle only existed for one class: the aristocracy. 

Civilisation 9: The Pursuit of Happiness: 4

  

By the time Watteau died, in 1721, the Rococo style was beginning to effect decoration and architecture. It became an international style ten years later, spreading across Europe in a similar fashion as early 15^th Century Gothic.  Rococo was the visual equivalent of the experience of joy and the visual articulation of pleasure.

Civilisation 9: The Pursuit of Happiness: 1

I put the first episode of Civilisation up on my blog because it showed the fragility of cultures and societies. It showed us some very interesting cultural artefacts. I suppose the ones that seemed more important to me were the examples of Celtic design in the Book of Kells. 

I was tempted to try and upload all of series, but I think that would be madness. So, it was best to be selective. I thought that I would race through the centuries and series and look at episode nine and the 18^th Century.  In the “The Pursuit of Happiness” Kenneth Clark reflects on the nature of 18th century music, the work of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. He discusses the painter Watteau and considers that some of its qualities are found in Rococo architecture. In 18^th century music “- its melodious flow, its complex symmetry, its decorative invention- are reflected in the architecture; but not its deeper appeal to the emotions” (Clark, K, 1969 p. 221). The discussion of the ornate design of Rococo is fascinating, because Clark makes the argument that “the Rococo style has a place in civilisation” (1969, p.221). Clarke complains that “serious minded used to call it shallow and corrupt, chiefly because it was intended for pleasure; well the founders of the American Constitution who were far from frivolous, thought fit to mention the pursuit of happiness as a proper aim of mankind, and even if ever this aim has been given visible form it is in Rococo architecture- the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love” (Clark, K, 1969 p. 221).

Clark does discuss the style that preceded Rococo, the classical style that was a symbol of a rigid and centralised authoritarian government. Classicism was, is the architecture of bureaucrats, “gifted civil servants” and not craftsmen- “grandeur achieved through the authoritarian state” and is the “architecture of a great metropolitan culture” (Clark, K, 1969 p. 221). There is in classicism a coldness and a “certain inhumanity”, that we see inform the architecture of power in the 20^th Century and beyond. The differences between classicism and the rococo recall an earlier observation by Clark about Greek classicism. It is, Clark argues, “static and cold” in comparison with the mobility of the symbol of the Atlantic man, the Viking ship (Clark, 1969 p.14). 

Sources:
Clark, K (1969) Civilisation: A personal view. London: BBC/J. Murray

Recent research into the Migraine aura and the mechanisms of visual hallucinations and its manifestations and representations in 20th Century Art:

My current ideas are concerned with investigations into the migraine aura. It has until now been through its re-presentations through the use of digital imaging software and photography, without real reference to or an acknowledgement of a 'condition of seeing'. In recognising the migraine aura as a source of artistic inspiration I have begun to explore the possible links between the migraine experience and visual hallucinations that accompany them and 20th century European art. I wish to address the similarities between the recorded descriptions of the migraine aura and the hallucinatory nature of Artaud’s verbal and Max Ernst’s non-verbal representations. Is it possible that the recurrent features in such work are based on this neurological disorder?

My research has explored digital imagery in print and film. It has including exploring the possibilities of art on the Internet, which culminated in the production of a digital film "Of Art and Migraines" for the BBC Telling Lives project (not a great “film” by a long chalk.). The content or main inspiration on my work brought my art to the attention of Dr Klaus Podoll of the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Technology (RWTH) Aachen, Germany. We exchanged theories about the influence of migraine auras on 20th Century Art and its source for artistic inspiration in contemporary art and he soon put me straight. The digital works I produce are an investigation into the relationship between my migraines and my practice as an artist. The digital images explore the nature of the migraine auras or hallucinations. My research has included writing about my work and its relationship with the auras and contains discussions about other artists who have possibly been inspired by the migraines optical effects and suffered similar conditions.

Dr Klaus Podoll kindly produced an article on the subject of visual migraine and my digital images. It my contribution to a website specifically devoted to the subject of "Migraine Art". You can visit The Migraine Aura Foundation website here : www.migraine-aura.org and www.migraine-aura.org/content.