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拍品專文
Gunther Gerzso's Autorretrato (1941) first saw the public light when works that had belonged to Mexican painter Julio Castellanos came on the market, long after his death. Until then, the drawing had not been either exhibited or reproduced. It is one of two known original drawings from the period in which Gerzso was initiating himself into Surrealism. The second, a portrait of Leonora Carrington from 1944, modeled in the manner of Max Ernst's images of her done between 1940-41, Gerzso used as point of departure for Carrington's symbolic semblance in Los Dias de la calle Gabino Barreda (1944). Unfortunately, since he considered these drawings more didactic exercises than representatives of who he was as painter, Gerzso destroyed most of them almost as quickly as he produced them. It is regrettable, they not only show his extraordinary skill as a draughtsman, but also convey elements - an obsession with ancient dwellings, fragmentation, and personal damage - that will become his personal iconography, both visually as well as psychologically, beginning in 1946.
Gerzso greatly admired Castellanos and owned three of the painter's finest works, La cirugía casera (n.d.), Las tias (1933) and El Día de San Juan (1939). As a gift, Castellanos drew a portrait of Gerzso in the manner of Picasso's 1920 portraits of Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie. Gerzso, in gratitude, gave Castellanos the Autorretrato.
When I asked Gerzso to tell me about the Autorretrato, he snickered: "All my paintings are self-portraits." I insisted. The work had not been made with the intention of producing a self-portrait, "I would call it more a "study of narcissism," he added as way of explanation. "Yes, but does the sitter have an identity?" I asked. Gerzso made the drawing the year after he was married, while visiting his in-laws in Susanville, California. On that particular evening, his father-in-law invited him on a walk, but Gerzso declined to stay home and read in his upstairs bedroom. He had just acquired the catalogue of Salvador Dalí's recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and was eager to study it. Even more than Picasso, Dalí, like a whirlwind, was riveting the public and the art world with his prodigious imagination. Surrealism and his name were considered synonymous. Gerzso was one of his admirers and created several biomorphic works - paintings and drawings - under his influence. Salome (1939) was one of these works; the drawing garnered Gerzso an honorable mention in Cleveland. Gerzso had taught himself how to draw by copying works by painters he admired such as van Gogh, Picasso, Ernst, and Dalí, among others.
On that evening, Gerzso became particularly taken by Dalí's painting reproduced on the cover of the catalogue: Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses (1933). It was one of a series Dalí began that year, inspired by Millet's well-loved painting of the peasants stopping work to say the evening prayer. Dalí explained that through his "paranoiac critical method," he had perceived a latent meaning hidden beneath the pious image. The praying woman, he explained, was in reality a praying mantis that represented the devouring, engulfing maternal dominance. Gerzso was fascinated.
Gerzso, who, like Dalí, had a passionate commitment to Freud and certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory, such as the belief that sexual repression is at the root of creativity, was compelled to recreate an element of this particular painting as one of his surrealist exercises. Using Dalí's drawing technique from his illustrations for Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, Gerzso drew out of the composition the bald-headed personage sitting directly beneath the full image of the Millet, above the doorway, around which Maxim Gorky is peering. The personage's identity: Vladimir Lenin.
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, Texas, March 2006
Gerzso greatly admired Castellanos and owned three of the painter's finest works, La cirugía casera (n.d.), Las tias (1933) and El Día de San Juan (1939). As a gift, Castellanos drew a portrait of Gerzso in the manner of Picasso's 1920 portraits of Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie. Gerzso, in gratitude, gave Castellanos the Autorretrato.
When I asked Gerzso to tell me about the Autorretrato, he snickered: "All my paintings are self-portraits." I insisted. The work had not been made with the intention of producing a self-portrait, "I would call it more a "study of narcissism," he added as way of explanation. "Yes, but does the sitter have an identity?" I asked. Gerzso made the drawing the year after he was married, while visiting his in-laws in Susanville, California. On that particular evening, his father-in-law invited him on a walk, but Gerzso declined to stay home and read in his upstairs bedroom. He had just acquired the catalogue of Salvador Dalí's recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and was eager to study it. Even more than Picasso, Dalí, like a whirlwind, was riveting the public and the art world with his prodigious imagination. Surrealism and his name were considered synonymous. Gerzso was one of his admirers and created several biomorphic works - paintings and drawings - under his influence. Salome (1939) was one of these works; the drawing garnered Gerzso an honorable mention in Cleveland. Gerzso had taught himself how to draw by copying works by painters he admired such as van Gogh, Picasso, Ernst, and Dalí, among others.
On that evening, Gerzso became particularly taken by Dalí's painting reproduced on the cover of the catalogue: Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses (1933). It was one of a series Dalí began that year, inspired by Millet's well-loved painting of the peasants stopping work to say the evening prayer. Dalí explained that through his "paranoiac critical method," he had perceived a latent meaning hidden beneath the pious image. The praying woman, he explained, was in reality a praying mantis that represented the devouring, engulfing maternal dominance. Gerzso was fascinated.
Gerzso, who, like Dalí, had a passionate commitment to Freud and certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory, such as the belief that sexual repression is at the root of creativity, was compelled to recreate an element of this particular painting as one of his surrealist exercises. Using Dalí's drawing technique from his illustrations for Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, Gerzso drew out of the composition the bald-headed personage sitting directly beneath the full image of the Millet, above the doorway, around which Maxim Gorky is peering. The personage's identity: Vladimir Lenin.
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, Texas, March 2006