拍品专文
Max Ernst probably learned about the Dada movement in Zurich from publications his fiancée Luise Straus sent him while he was on duty on the Eastern front in 1918. In October he married Luise in Cologne and after the Armistice of November 11 they rented an apartment there. Ernst's paintings from late 1918 and early 1919 are expressionist in style, reflecting his response to the violence and anxiety of the war years. He was affiliated with the groups Der Strom and Das Junge Rheinland.
While visiting Munich in September, 1919, Ernst met Hugo Ball, the founder of the Dada Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and at Hans Goltz's gallery he again encountered Dada publications and saw reproductions of works by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, which had an immediate impact on his work. A month later he re-established contact with Jean Arp, whom he had last seen before the war. Arp was active in the Zurich Dada group and his friendship was one of many forces which quickly drew Ernst into the Dada movement. Within a couple of months Ernst and his friend Johannes Baargeld formed the "Bulletin D" group, whose first exhibition marked the beginning of the Dada movement in Cologne.
Étamines et Marseillaise d'Arp, offered here, demonstrates how quickly Ernst moved from Expressionism to Dada. In 1936, Ernst
described the experience which precipitated his first collages
ÿ One rainy day in 1919...my excited gaze was provoked by
the pages of a printed catalogue. The advertisements
illustrated objects relating to anthropological,
microscopical, psychological, mineralogical, and
paleontological research. Here I discovered the elements
of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provoked
in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of signt--
a hallucinatory succession of contradictory images, double,
triple, multiple....By simply painting or drawing, it sufficed
to add to the illustrations a color, a line, a landscape
foreign to the objects represented--a desert, a sky, a
geological section, a floor, a single straight horizontal
expressing the horizon, and so forth. These changes, no more
than docile reproductions of what was visible within me,
recorded a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They
transformed the banal pages of advertisement into dramas which
revealed my most secret desires. (ed. R. Motherwell, Beyond Painting: And Other Writings by the Artist and his Friends,
New York, 1948, p.14)
In this further refinement of the collage technique, Ernst uses actual relief blocks from a printing shop. The vertical constructions recall de Chirico's wooden mannequins, and like de Chirico he uses linear perspective and shadows to create the illusion of depth. The forms are not unlike Picabia's mechanomorphic Dada imagery, but are far more complex in conception and rendering. Professor William Camfield has called this drawing the "climactic" work in this series (op. cit., p. 69ÿ.
While visiting Munich in September, 1919, Ernst met Hugo Ball, the founder of the Dada Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and at Hans Goltz's gallery he again encountered Dada publications and saw reproductions of works by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, which had an immediate impact on his work. A month later he re-established contact with Jean Arp, whom he had last seen before the war. Arp was active in the Zurich Dada group and his friendship was one of many forces which quickly drew Ernst into the Dada movement. Within a couple of months Ernst and his friend Johannes Baargeld formed the "Bulletin D" group, whose first exhibition marked the beginning of the Dada movement in Cologne.
Étamines et Marseillaise d'Arp, offered here, demonstrates how quickly Ernst moved from Expressionism to Dada. In 1936, Ernst
described the experience which precipitated his first collages
ÿ One rainy day in 1919...my excited gaze was provoked by
the pages of a printed catalogue. The advertisements
illustrated objects relating to anthropological,
microscopical, psychological, mineralogical, and
paleontological research. Here I discovered the elements
of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provoked
in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of signt--
a hallucinatory succession of contradictory images, double,
triple, multiple....By simply painting or drawing, it sufficed
to add to the illustrations a color, a line, a landscape
foreign to the objects represented--a desert, a sky, a
geological section, a floor, a single straight horizontal
expressing the horizon, and so forth. These changes, no more
than docile reproductions of what was visible within me,
recorded a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They
transformed the banal pages of advertisement into dramas which
revealed my most secret desires. (ed. R. Motherwell, Beyond Painting: And Other Writings by the Artist and his Friends,
New York, 1948, p.14)
In this further refinement of the collage technique, Ernst uses actual relief blocks from a printing shop. The vertical constructions recall de Chirico's wooden mannequins, and like de Chirico he uses linear perspective and shadows to create the illusion of depth. The forms are not unlike Picabia's mechanomorphic Dada imagery, but are far more complex in conception and rendering. Professor William Camfield has called this drawing the "climactic" work in this series (op. cit., p. 69ÿ.