It is hardly a new thought that a surrealist artist was influenced by the psychological studies of Freud and others. Usually that influence has been described in terms of strange dream-like images, which
are seen as symbolic representations of emotional states. Indeed, this is often psychology's main legacy to Surrealist art. But for artists such as Max Ernst (1891-1976), the debt to psychological study is on a more fundamental level, for psychology was able to provide not only a subject but a method of structuring it.
Sometime around the time Ernst was going to college at the University of Bonn (post-WWI), when his knowledge and use of psychology rapidly growing, he worked in a mental hospital. Because Bonn was an intellectually active city at the time, Ernst learned not only the more conventional psychological theories of the day, but also Freud's theories and writings through a friend, Karl Otten, who had been a student of Freud's in Vienna.
Shortly after the completion of his military service, Ernst reentered the art world, he did not return to the Expressionist group however, several of whose key members had been killed in the war. Instead, he developed with Hans Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld the Dada movement in Cologne, and began to explore the possibilities of collage as an expressive medium. He cut apart and combined fragments of engravings from popular 19th century books, photographs, and even his own drawings. Ernst's Dada collages and paintings and then his Surrealist works were interpretations of the inner life in a modern and irreverent medium replacing the freely painted and more traditional emotional expressions of his college years.
In these later works Ernst concerned himself with their almost-literary significance rather than their formal beauty. Ernst't choices of visual symbols and the way in which they were combined were of central significance to his work. Ironically, this meant that form was of greater importance than subject. The form in question here is what Freud refers to in his book "Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious" when he writes that humor resides in the form of the joke rather than in the subject. For example, people have sexual feelings--true, but not funny nor very profound. But this idea couched in an apt set of words, or juxtaposed to another idea, or associated with a specific individual might be either funny or indeed profound. Form in this context is the configuration in which the parts of the idea have assembled.
How efficiently a joke is communicated, how appropriately stated, and how cleverly worded are the gauges of its success. Ernst's importance as a Surrealist artist lied in the fact that he used Freud's discussion of verbal mechanisms such as puns as the basis of organization in his collages, which like sentences, are made up of preexisting units that take on new meaning from their interrelationships with other units. Besides forming visual ideas, the devices described by Freud in Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious also frame or encapsulate them in order to present them to a public. This effective packaging of an idea is, as Freud points out, important because communication to a second person or a selected public is a necessary part of joke-work. Another important source of ideas and symbolism would have been The Interpretation of Dreams, but because dreams are both personal and vague in form, it would never have been as helpful as the former in providing Ernst with structural models.
Among Ernst's works that demonstrate the artist's reliance on many of Freud's writings is the painting 'Oedipus Rex' (1922), made according to the collage method of combining images from apparently disparate sources. Each image preserves its own scale, shadow, and perspective. The title of the painting links it to Freud's theory of the relationship between parents and their children.
Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold
An Important Surrealist collage by Max Ernst, Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold or Le Jeune Prince (The Young Prince), has recently been acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Museum's recently acquired collage is one of four from an unrealized series called Morceaux Chiosis de l'histoire de France (Morsels [minor events] Chosen from the History of France). The other collages in this group are titled: (The Spirit of Locarno), (Nostradamus, Blanche of Castile, and the Little Saint Louis), and (The Religion of the State).
The images in the original engraving include a young man in Renaissance costume exploding upward out of a wooden bucket floating in a body of water before a castle. A full moon illuminates a flock of distant birds in the night sky. To what is apparently an illustration for a fairy tale. Ernst added the inverted image of what seems to be a dolphin or large fish over the head and upper torso of the prince, thus giving him a monstrous bird-like appearance. The female figure in the wooden bucket and the beetle on the surface of the water are also elements supplied by Ernst.
The bucket, it seems, was cut close around the edges and the woman figure inserted behind it, and the cut sections pasted back down. The beetle, however, covers the signature of the original illustrator, its legs and feeler being formed by parts of the letters left exposes from underneath. By placing a light behind this area and using an infra-red viewer, one will discern the following letters in ink: Montegut.
It seems likely that Louis Montégut (born 1855), a French illustrator who did designs for La Chronique Parisienne, was the author of the illustration used by Ernst as the basis for this collage. Thus, an illustration, possibly for a fairy tale, has been transformed into a fantastic scene with a title referring to an obscure incident from French history.
Charles the Bold (1433-1477) was the last reigning duke of Burgundy. He came into opposition with Louis XI of France when he attempted to conquer Alsace, Loraine, and other French territories in order to re-establish the kingdom of Lotharingia. In the battle for Beauvais, on 27 Jun 1472, as the Burgundian forces were about to overwhelm the 300 French defenders, a young woman, Jeanne (whose surname was Laisné or Fourquet) entered the battle armed with an axe. She hurled a Burgundian man-at-arms from the battlements, and tore down the Burgundian banner. Her act rallied the French garrison who repelled the invaders. Thus, she is known to history as Jeanne Hatchette (Jean Hatchet).
This event, still commemorated yearly in Beauvais, was obscure enough to qualify as on of Ernst's 'Morsels'.
Max Ernst,
Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold, 1929, Cleveland Museum of Art.
*(http://clevelandart.org/art/1982.39)
An Important Surrealist collage by Max Ernst, Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold or Le Jeune Prince (The Young Prince), has recently been acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Museum's recently acquired collage is one of four from an unrealized series called Morceaux Chiosis de l'histoire de France (Morsels [minor events] Chosen from the History of France). The other collages in this group are titled: (The Spirit of Locarno), (Nostradamus, Blanche of Castile, and the Little Saint Louis), and (The Religion of the State).
The images in the original engraving include a young man in Renaissance costume exploding upward out of a wooden bucket floating in a body of water before a castle. A full moon illuminates a flock of distant birds in the night sky. To what is apparently an illustration for a fairy tale. Ernst added the inverted image of what seems to be a dolphin or large fish over the head and upper torso of the prince, thus giving him a monstrous bird-like appearance. The female figure in the wooden bucket and the beetle on the surface of the water are also elements supplied by Ernst.
The bucket, it seems, was cut close around the edges and the woman figure inserted behind it, and the cut sections pasted back down. The beetle, however, covers the signature of the original illustrator, its legs and feeler being formed by parts of the letters left exposes from underneath. By placing a light behind this area and using an infra-red viewer, one will discern the following letters in ink: Montegut.
It seems likely that Louis Montégut (born 1855), a French illustrator who did designs for La Chronique Parisienne, was the author of the illustration used by Ernst as the basis for this collage. Thus, an illustration, possibly for a fairy tale, has been transformed into a fantastic scene with a title referring to an obscure incident from French history.
Charles the Bold (1433-1477) was the last reigning duke of Burgundy. He came into opposition with Louis XI of France when he attempted to conquer Alsace, Loraine, and other French territories in order to re-establish the kingdom of Lotharingia. In the battle for Beauvais, on 27 Jun 1472, as the Burgundian forces were about to overwhelm the 300 French defenders, a young woman, Jeanne (whose surname was Laisné or Fourquet) entered the battle armed with an axe. She hurled a Burgundian man-at-arms from the battlements, and tore down the Burgundian banner. Her act rallied the French garrison who repelled the invaders. Thus, she is known to history as Jeanne Hatchette (Jean Hatchet).
This event, still commemorated yearly in Beauvais, was obscure enough to qualify as on of Ernst's 'Morsels'.
Max Ernst,
Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold, 1929, Cleveland Museum of Art.
*(http://clevelandart.org/art/1982.39)
*Stokes, Charlotte.
"Collage as Jokework: Freud's
Theories of Wit as the foundation for the Collages of Max Ernst." Leonardo,
No. 3, 1982: 199-204.
*Henning, Edward B.
"Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold a
Surrealist Collage by Max Ernst." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum
of Art, No. 8, 1982:
273-278.
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