Ulrich Bischoff

A pleasurable read I finished in an afternoon about a painter whose melancholic, surreal, dynamic paintings I have always found fascinating. Now I know a large part of that mood was due to how constant death was for him with mother dying young then his sister, then his father, & his contraction of several serious illnesses. It doesn't go deeply into any theories or try to psycho-analyse the man or his paintings. It's a great primer for someone like me who isn't familiar with the world of art, and just really likes appreciating it.

I loved the pictured paintings & the short descriptions provided & in fact I wish I could see/read more of his diary entries because he actually writes so poetically too. His own descriptions of his paintings were the best..

‎“I was out walking with two Friends –the sun began to set- suddenly the sky turned blood-‎red –I paused, feeling exhausted, and there I still stood, trembling with fear –and I sensed an ‎endless scream passing through Nature.” – Edvard Munch on The Scream

“All the tenderness in the world is in your face –Moonlight passes across it- Your lips crimson ‎as the fruit that is to come part as if in pain. The smile of a corpse. Your face is full of the ‎beauty and the pain in the world, because Death and Life are joining hands and the chain that ‎links the thousands of generations of the dead with the thousands of generations yet to be ‎born is connected.” – Edvard Munch on Madonna

… (más)

Max Ernst (1891-1996) ist eine der wichtigsten Figuren des Dadaismus und Surrealismus. Als Student in Bonn fühlte er sich zur Dada-Bewegung hingezogen, die als Gegenreaktion auf das Massenschlachten des Ersten Weltkriegs entstanden war.

Die Schließung der berühmten Dada-Ausstellung in Köln wegen "Obszönität" veranlasste Ernst, den Rest seines Lebens in Paris zu verbringen, wo er mit den Surrealisten in Kontakt kam. Ernst zeichnet sich vor allem durch seine stilistische und technische Vielfalt aus und hat ein Oeuvre geschaffen, das von Gemälden, Zeichnungen und Skulpturen über Texte und Bühnenbilder bis hin zu Collage-Romanen und der Entwicklung einer eigenen "Frottage"-Technik reicht.

Im Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde Ernst, wie viele seiner Kollegen, zum "unerwünschten Ausländer" und musste emigrieren; nach dem Krieg kehrte er jedoch in seine Wahlheimat zurück. Nach dem Krieg kehrte er jedoch in seine Wahlheimat zurück. 1954 erhielt er den Großen Preis für Malerei auf der Biennale in Venedig, und in den 1960er Jahren wurde sein Werk mit großen Retrospektiven gewürdigt.… (más)

Munch moved away from Naturalism, the scientific recording of the natural world, even moving away from Impressionism. He digged his own psyche and record subjective experience, and that is how you get something as terrifying as ‘The Scream’ This is how dark subjectivity warps the natural world.

He wrote this later about ‘The Scream.’

"I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned bloody red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood an tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

If you read letters, diary, or memoir of a sufferer of depression (Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Kafka) you’ll find similar moments of disturbing transformation. The tragic relationship between madness & creativity is undeniable. Some ran from that fact, others refused to look away.… (más)

The Eye of Silence

Max Ernst: Beyond Painting. Ninety pages of artistic dynamite with an extended essay by art historian Ulrich Bischoff. Part of the Taschen series with dozens of pages filled with Max Ernst art, the majority in color, this volume offers a solid foundation for anyone interested in the artist’s life and work. Below are a number of direct quotes from the essay along with my comments:

“Max Ernst, who grew up in a petty bourgeois home in the Rhineland experienced art and culture either as an occupation for affluent citizens on Sundays and holidays, or as the dry object of investigation in the hands of art history professors.” ----------- His stuffy home in a small German town was simply the outermost shell, and a thin shell at that; what is critically important is how, even at a young age, Max Ernst possessed an imagination on fire with vision and a boundless sense of freedom, as in, for example, "Oedipus Rex, 1922."


“Ernst’s main means of escape was to make use of objects having little to do with art and to employ an absolutely new technique.” ---------- That’s “objects having little to do with art” from a coarse, conventional perspective, that is, objects men and women stuck in lackluster, petty categories would never remotely consider as part of art. However, for one of the most dynamic creators of the 20th century, everything he came in contact with, large and small, no matter how mundane or commonplace, as if base metal in an alchemist’s laboratory, could be worked and transformed into artistic gold. Case in Point: "Fruit of a Long Experience."


“The young student was interested in obscure fields of study and had a predilection for all kinds of strange, offbeat topics. His attempt to break away, which was mainly made possible by his use of chance and the unconscious, was a successful one.” --------- Ha! “Offbeat” and “strange” are relative terms. For an artistic imagination on fire, working within the confines of any approach blocking off the power of chance, accident, unforeseen possibilities or the bizarre is judged as so much stuffy prattle. Below; "The Murdering Airplane"


“Like a magician, Max Ernst the artist transformed whatever he touched, whether sacred or profane.” ---------- I couldn’t imagine an artist having more disregard for his own tradition and culture, even when that tradition and culture touches on elements of the sacred, than his painting “Young Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus In Front of Three Witnesses.”


“Throughout the whole of Max Ernst’s works, hands play an important part. For the deaf, they are the main means of communication and since his father was a teacher of the deaf, Max Ernst was confronted with sign language from an early age.” ---------- How about that – watching his father teach sign language made a profound impact on young Max. Such attention to the delicacy of hand and fingers can be seen in his “At the First Clear Word.”


“His search for a technical means of avoiding a direct application of paint runs through his entire work, as do his efforts to carry out the picture itself and its subject with elements non-related to art. . . . In “Paris Dream” he used a wire comb to scrape two-thirds of a circle into the final surface of beige-grey paint, revealing a layer of blue below.” ---------- What I particularly enjoy about this painting is the contrast between the bold colors set out in a checkerboard grid across three mountains and the pale lightness of the upper half, the circle (actually many circles within circles) having echoes of an astrologer’s symbol for sun.


“The methods Max Ernst developed to stay “beyond” the classical way of painting taught at art schools have had an enormous influence on international art: collage, assemblage, montage, grattage, and decalcomania are techniques which he either developed himself or made us of in such a way that they soon became acceptable to both art schools and society alike.” ---------- The mark of a great artist is to leave the field you work in expanded and renewed. By my eye, the two works below are examples of the profound influence Max Ernst has had on the visual arts: “Europe after the Rain II” and “Capricorn.” Capricorn has a special appeal since Max appears with his honey!






Photo of the Artist as a Young Man -- Max Ernst (1891-1976)… (más)