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拍品专文
Le monde des flous - Refus absolu de vivre comme un tachiste (The World of Blurs – I absolutely refuse to live as a tachiste) is one of Max Ernst’s finest and most important pictures of the 1960s. Created in 1965, this work, with its long and mysterious title was the centrepiece of Ernst’s landmark exhibition held at the Alexandre Iolas Gallery in Paris in November of that year. This show, entitled Le musée de l’homme suivi de la pêche au soleil levant marked the first showing of a major series of assemblages that were to distinguish Ernst’s oeuvre of this period. It also marked the first display of Ernst’s astronomical paintings, following the 1964 publication of his famous ‘astronomical’ book of secret writing entitled 65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy.
Incorporating many of these elements and several others drawn from throughout Ernst’s entire career, Le monde des flous... is a large painted assemblage. Like his other great masterpiece from this year, the similarly titled painting, Le monde des naïfs, (The World of the naïve) now in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it depicts a sparkling sequence of astronomical constellations, each covered in Ernst’s own idiosyncratic secret script, or Geheimschrift. Unlike the more abstract Le monde des naïfs however, the constellations of this work coalesce into the image of two ‘Loplop’ or birdman-type figures presenting cages. These cages, now empty of the birds that so often used to appear within them in Ernst’s paintings of the 1920s and 1930s (save for an amusing feather in the right-hand example), are real, physical, collaged elements that have been appended to the otherwise illusory surface of the work. In contrast to the absent and perhaps ‘liberated’ bird indicated in the right-hand cage, the left-hand cage contains a stencil set of the kind that Ernst had often used in the creation of his early works. So too, is the wheel-like grill that Ernst has here added to form the image of a sun radiating at the centre of the work. This disc is an item that has previously been used as part of Ernst’s spray technique in several earlier paintings and etchings. Such self-referencing to the motifs, tools and techniques of his then five-decades long creative practice in this work is therefore entirely intentional and is also referenced by the long title Ernst has chosen to give to this exceptional work.
As Ernst scholars Lunger Derenthal and Jürgen Pech have pointed out, the origin of this work’s title lies in a text that Ernst wrote specially for the catalogue of his 1965 exhibition at the Iolas Gallery in which he speaks of ‘an early 20th-century magazine, “The Revolt of the Blurs” whose aim was supposedly to sow chaos and discord. The unfortunate consequence of this attempt was the fracturing of the art world into enemy clans, into “pictorial isms and schisms” battling each other in a war of words “with insults, threats, praise and weekly slurs, prefaces and vitriol, with ever-increasing violence and perfidy.” The first victims were the “nobler, more vigorous, more conscious, more demanding, more just, more audacious, more beautiful adversaries who, unlike the others, live, love, sing, shine, burn, and are consumed apart from the clans, the clergy, the labourers, the colonizers, the colonels, and the prophets.” With underlying bitterness, Max Ernst summarizes the history of modern art as an uninterrupted series of quarrels and feuds’ (Derenthal and Pech, Max Ernst, Paris, 1992, p. 261).
The second part of this title – ‘I absolutely refuse to live as a tachiste’ – refers to Ernst’s own position in this regrettable sequence of ‘isms and schisms’ into which he saw avant-garde art descending. As Werner Spies has pointed out in this regard, the ‘informel’ style that so ‘dominated postwar painting... [was]… greatly indebted to Max Ernst. Without Ernst one could not imagine Fautrier, Dubuffet, and the rest.? [But] there is, however, nothing informal about his own fragmentary structures. They are always linked with a concrete interpretation; they spring from a fundamental conviction, an experience deeply rooted in his life story’ (The Return of la belle jardinière: Max Ernst 1950-1970, New York, 1971, pp. 63-64).
As the artist himself told Edouard Roditi in a sequence of interviews held in 1962 and then again in 1967, Ernst saw his own creative ‘point of departure’ as being exactly where the tachistes stopped. ‘If I have allowed chance to play an important part in the creation of a number of my works,’ he said, ‘I did this... in order to interpret these chance effects in my own manner..., in human terms and in the terms of my own dream world, which is certainly personal and no other man’s dream world... Jackson Pollock and his friends who later became masters of the New York school of abstract expressionism all used to come to my New York studio to learn the trick of… [drip painting]. But I never claimed to have invented anything at all truly novel. It remained in my eyes only a new way of more rapidly obtaining those kinds of stains or colour in which – Leonardo da Vinci had once observed — a painter can discover subjects for his paintings and, by having recourse to chance, really provoke inspiration… The orthodox tachiste... forbids himself to yield to the attractions of a free interplay of “visions” and interpretations. His attitude is one of total refusal for himself, total freedom for the viewer to take his place. In a word, he presents his stains and lets the viewer get on with it! Thus, the painter’s role is limited to giving his stains, lines, colours and other materials a quality sufficiently “thought-provoking” to arouse the viewer’s curiosity... As for myself, I grant the painter the right to speak, to laugh, to adopt a position and to enjoy all his hallucinatory faculties, but I absolutely refuse to live as a tachiste’ (quoted in E. Roditi, ed., Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1989, p. 30).
Emerging out of the apparent cosmic chaos of this picture, it is this same attitude that the two Loplop-like creatures of Le monde des flous… reiterate as they present their own framed creations amidst a celestial skyscape filled with the suggestions of a secret language.
Incorporating many of these elements and several others drawn from throughout Ernst’s entire career, Le monde des flous... is a large painted assemblage. Like his other great masterpiece from this year, the similarly titled painting, Le monde des naïfs, (The World of the naïve) now in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it depicts a sparkling sequence of astronomical constellations, each covered in Ernst’s own idiosyncratic secret script, or Geheimschrift. Unlike the more abstract Le monde des naïfs however, the constellations of this work coalesce into the image of two ‘Loplop’ or birdman-type figures presenting cages. These cages, now empty of the birds that so often used to appear within them in Ernst’s paintings of the 1920s and 1930s (save for an amusing feather in the right-hand example), are real, physical, collaged elements that have been appended to the otherwise illusory surface of the work. In contrast to the absent and perhaps ‘liberated’ bird indicated in the right-hand cage, the left-hand cage contains a stencil set of the kind that Ernst had often used in the creation of his early works. So too, is the wheel-like grill that Ernst has here added to form the image of a sun radiating at the centre of the work. This disc is an item that has previously been used as part of Ernst’s spray technique in several earlier paintings and etchings. Such self-referencing to the motifs, tools and techniques of his then five-decades long creative practice in this work is therefore entirely intentional and is also referenced by the long title Ernst has chosen to give to this exceptional work.
As Ernst scholars Lunger Derenthal and Jürgen Pech have pointed out, the origin of this work’s title lies in a text that Ernst wrote specially for the catalogue of his 1965 exhibition at the Iolas Gallery in which he speaks of ‘an early 20th-century magazine, “The Revolt of the Blurs” whose aim was supposedly to sow chaos and discord. The unfortunate consequence of this attempt was the fracturing of the art world into enemy clans, into “pictorial isms and schisms” battling each other in a war of words “with insults, threats, praise and weekly slurs, prefaces and vitriol, with ever-increasing violence and perfidy.” The first victims were the “nobler, more vigorous, more conscious, more demanding, more just, more audacious, more beautiful adversaries who, unlike the others, live, love, sing, shine, burn, and are consumed apart from the clans, the clergy, the labourers, the colonizers, the colonels, and the prophets.” With underlying bitterness, Max Ernst summarizes the history of modern art as an uninterrupted series of quarrels and feuds’ (Derenthal and Pech, Max Ernst, Paris, 1992, p. 261).
The second part of this title – ‘I absolutely refuse to live as a tachiste’ – refers to Ernst’s own position in this regrettable sequence of ‘isms and schisms’ into which he saw avant-garde art descending. As Werner Spies has pointed out in this regard, the ‘informel’ style that so ‘dominated postwar painting... [was]… greatly indebted to Max Ernst. Without Ernst one could not imagine Fautrier, Dubuffet, and the rest.? [But] there is, however, nothing informal about his own fragmentary structures. They are always linked with a concrete interpretation; they spring from a fundamental conviction, an experience deeply rooted in his life story’ (The Return of la belle jardinière: Max Ernst 1950-1970, New York, 1971, pp. 63-64).
As the artist himself told Edouard Roditi in a sequence of interviews held in 1962 and then again in 1967, Ernst saw his own creative ‘point of departure’ as being exactly where the tachistes stopped. ‘If I have allowed chance to play an important part in the creation of a number of my works,’ he said, ‘I did this... in order to interpret these chance effects in my own manner..., in human terms and in the terms of my own dream world, which is certainly personal and no other man’s dream world... Jackson Pollock and his friends who later became masters of the New York school of abstract expressionism all used to come to my New York studio to learn the trick of… [drip painting]. But I never claimed to have invented anything at all truly novel. It remained in my eyes only a new way of more rapidly obtaining those kinds of stains or colour in which – Leonardo da Vinci had once observed — a painter can discover subjects for his paintings and, by having recourse to chance, really provoke inspiration… The orthodox tachiste... forbids himself to yield to the attractions of a free interplay of “visions” and interpretations. His attitude is one of total refusal for himself, total freedom for the viewer to take his place. In a word, he presents his stains and lets the viewer get on with it! Thus, the painter’s role is limited to giving his stains, lines, colours and other materials a quality sufficiently “thought-provoking” to arouse the viewer’s curiosity... As for myself, I grant the painter the right to speak, to laugh, to adopt a position and to enjoy all his hallucinatory faculties, but I absolutely refuse to live as a tachiste’ (quoted in E. Roditi, ed., Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1989, p. 30).
Emerging out of the apparent cosmic chaos of this picture, it is this same attitude that the two Loplop-like creatures of Le monde des flous… reiterate as they present their own framed creations amidst a celestial skyscape filled with the suggestions of a secret language.