.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
"The time should come to assert the ideas of woman at the expense of those of man, the bankruptcy of which is today so tumultuously complete."
So wrote André Breton at the end of the Second World War advocating a call for the establishment of a matriarchy - a notion that, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was one that was being seriously entertained by many in the chauvinistic Surrealist movement at this time. It is also a notion that also seems to inform many of Max Ernst's paintings of the period. Ernst, as a veteran of the First World War and an exile in the Second had increasingly come to believe in the redundancy of the male-dominated political culture of repetitive violence and retaliation and, in a series of outstanding paintings, had begun to explore utopian ideas of change.
Convolvulus! Convolvulus! is one of a small group of exceptional decalcomania paintings that Ernst painted shortly after arriving in the United States in 1941. Several of these wild and exquisitely detailed paintings were actually begun in Europe and only completed several months later after Ernst had been admitted into America. Hieronymous Bosch-like in their fanatical attention to detail and in the fertility displayed by the artist's creative imagination, their central theme is one of metamorphosis and regeneration. While some of these works, like Europe After the Rain or Totem and Taboo seem to concentrate on the desolation of a Europe that Ernst had left behind him, others such as The Stolen Mirror, Napoleon in the Wilderness, Everyone here speaks Latin and the present painting, appear more optimistic and emphasise the regeneration of this same devastated landscape.
Ernst entered the USA in July 1941 and soon afterwards spent several weeks travelling through the country visiting New Orleans, San Francisco, Arizona and New Mexico. His journey through the red rock landscape of Arizona proved a revelation for him as the million-year-old incrustations and spectacular rock formations of this extraordinary landscape clearly echoed the mysterious landscapes he had often painted and which were again beginning to be articulated in his latest decalcomania works. "There (in Arizona) I found once more the landscape which had always been in my mind and which is to be found time and again in my early pictures", Ernst later recalled.
The semi-automatic nature of decalcomania technique - (the applying of diluted oil colour to the surface of the painting and then pressing a smooth surface such as a sheet of glass against it and subsequently removing it to create an intensely detailed patterning which, like Leonardo's clouds, then prompt the painter to the creation of new and surprising images) - lent itself ideally to the depiction of metamorphosis as well as to the creation of mysterious forest-like rocky landscapes of dense and perplexing detail. In structure, these rocky forests, echo the mysterious citadels and dark forest landscapes that Ernst had painted in the 1920s. Foreboding impenetrable forests had always haunted Ernst's imagination since his childhood days in Brühl where he had grown up living near the edge of a forest. With the increasing likelihood of war growing throughout the 1930s a corresponding sense of doom and foreboding increasingly characterises his forest landscapes of the period, but after the war had begun, it is the concept of change that comes to dominate his work.
As in Convolvulus! Convolvulus! Ernst's decalcomania landscapes concentrate on the miracle of vegetative transformation. Predominantly female creatures such as women, birds, owls, cows, and mantises for example materialise out of the myriad of detail. At the same time seemingly static mineral formations seem to sprout into vegetative and floral life. The title of this painting, Convolvulus! Convolvulus! almost certainly refers to this phenomenon in its exaltation and repetition of the Latin classificatory term "convolvulus". Convolvulus mauritanicus is the scientific name for the plant known as Morning Glory, while Convulvulus arvensis is a small white flowering plant found chiefly in Sedona, Arizona where Ernst was shortly to live.
The emergence of predominantly female creatures from the dark depths of these extraordinary decalcomania forests has prompted comparison between these pictures and the notion that Ernst was dreaming of the emergence after the war of a utopia founded on the establishment of a matriarchal society. While this may seem a little far-fetched it is certainly true that these memorable mental landscapes do all seem to be allegorical representations of the birth of the female. All fantastical and tumultuous landscapes largely devoid of male life, from Mythological Woman of 1940 to The Stolen Mirror of 1941 they seem to catalogue the awakening of the female or a goddess who has formerly been encrusted, cocoon-like in the forms of the landscape. Convolvulus! Convolvulus! is no exception in this respect. Covered in flowers, in the right hand corner of the painting reveals the emergence of a bird-headed woman whose full belly suggests that she too is pregnant with life. Crowned by a male-devouring mantis-like head-dress adorned with the head of a cow, it becomes hard not to see this figure as a mythological fertility goddess and the painting as a whole as an optimistic allegorical portrait of a land that, "after the rain" has fallen, is sprouting into a new bloom.
So wrote André Breton at the end of the Second World War advocating a call for the establishment of a matriarchy - a notion that, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was one that was being seriously entertained by many in the chauvinistic Surrealist movement at this time. It is also a notion that also seems to inform many of Max Ernst's paintings of the period. Ernst, as a veteran of the First World War and an exile in the Second had increasingly come to believe in the redundancy of the male-dominated political culture of repetitive violence and retaliation and, in a series of outstanding paintings, had begun to explore utopian ideas of change.
Convolvulus! Convolvulus! is one of a small group of exceptional decalcomania paintings that Ernst painted shortly after arriving in the United States in 1941. Several of these wild and exquisitely detailed paintings were actually begun in Europe and only completed several months later after Ernst had been admitted into America. Hieronymous Bosch-like in their fanatical attention to detail and in the fertility displayed by the artist's creative imagination, their central theme is one of metamorphosis and regeneration. While some of these works, like Europe After the Rain or Totem and Taboo seem to concentrate on the desolation of a Europe that Ernst had left behind him, others such as The Stolen Mirror, Napoleon in the Wilderness, Everyone here speaks Latin and the present painting, appear more optimistic and emphasise the regeneration of this same devastated landscape.
Ernst entered the USA in July 1941 and soon afterwards spent several weeks travelling through the country visiting New Orleans, San Francisco, Arizona and New Mexico. His journey through the red rock landscape of Arizona proved a revelation for him as the million-year-old incrustations and spectacular rock formations of this extraordinary landscape clearly echoed the mysterious landscapes he had often painted and which were again beginning to be articulated in his latest decalcomania works. "There (in Arizona) I found once more the landscape which had always been in my mind and which is to be found time and again in my early pictures", Ernst later recalled.
The semi-automatic nature of decalcomania technique - (the applying of diluted oil colour to the surface of the painting and then pressing a smooth surface such as a sheet of glass against it and subsequently removing it to create an intensely detailed patterning which, like Leonardo's clouds, then prompt the painter to the creation of new and surprising images) - lent itself ideally to the depiction of metamorphosis as well as to the creation of mysterious forest-like rocky landscapes of dense and perplexing detail. In structure, these rocky forests, echo the mysterious citadels and dark forest landscapes that Ernst had painted in the 1920s. Foreboding impenetrable forests had always haunted Ernst's imagination since his childhood days in Brühl where he had grown up living near the edge of a forest. With the increasing likelihood of war growing throughout the 1930s a corresponding sense of doom and foreboding increasingly characterises his forest landscapes of the period, but after the war had begun, it is the concept of change that comes to dominate his work.
As in Convolvulus! Convolvulus! Ernst's decalcomania landscapes concentrate on the miracle of vegetative transformation. Predominantly female creatures such as women, birds, owls, cows, and mantises for example materialise out of the myriad of detail. At the same time seemingly static mineral formations seem to sprout into vegetative and floral life. The title of this painting, Convolvulus! Convolvulus! almost certainly refers to this phenomenon in its exaltation and repetition of the Latin classificatory term "convolvulus". Convolvulus mauritanicus is the scientific name for the plant known as Morning Glory, while Convulvulus arvensis is a small white flowering plant found chiefly in Sedona, Arizona where Ernst was shortly to live.
The emergence of predominantly female creatures from the dark depths of these extraordinary decalcomania forests has prompted comparison between these pictures and the notion that Ernst was dreaming of the emergence after the war of a utopia founded on the establishment of a matriarchal society. While this may seem a little far-fetched it is certainly true that these memorable mental landscapes do all seem to be allegorical representations of the birth of the female. All fantastical and tumultuous landscapes largely devoid of male life, from Mythological Woman of 1940 to The Stolen Mirror of 1941 they seem to catalogue the awakening of the female or a goddess who has formerly been encrusted, cocoon-like in the forms of the landscape. Convolvulus! Convolvulus! is no exception in this respect. Covered in flowers, in the right hand corner of the painting reveals the emergence of a bird-headed woman whose full belly suggests that she too is pregnant with life. Crowned by a male-devouring mantis-like head-dress adorned with the head of a cow, it becomes hard not to see this figure as a mythological fertility goddess and the painting as a whole as an optimistic allegorical portrait of a land that, "after the rain" has fallen, is sprouting into a new bloom.