The Technique and Conquest of collage

One of the things that Ernst is really known for, is his gift of making collages with pictures of different sources and making them look like they all belong in one unified, surreal, and sometimes comical scene. He talks about the enjoyment of making collages as well as the difficulties in a portion of his book, Beyond Painting when he asks himself the question: 

What is the most noble conquest of collage?

He talked about the irrational and the magisterial eruption of the irrational in all domains of art, of poetry, of science, in the private life of individuals, in the public life of peoples. He said, "He who speaks of collage speaks of the irrational. Collage has crept slyly into our common objects. We have acclaimed its appearance in the realist films (I am thinking of The Golden Age of Bunuel and Dali: the cow in the bed, the bishop and the giraffe flung through the window, the chariot crossing the salon of the governor, the minister of the Interior glued to the ceiling after his suicide, etc.). 

In assembling collages one after another, without choice; he says, we have been surprised by the clarity of the irrational action that resulted in works such as: The Hundred-Headed Woman (Woman Without a Head), the Dream of a Little Girl Who Wished to Enter Carmel, the Week of Kindness. 

He also goes to mention, "Do not forget this other conquest of collage: Surrealist Painting, in at least one of its multiple aspects, that which, between 1921 and 1924, I was the only one to develop and in which, later, while I advanced alone, feeling my way, into the yet unexplored forests of frottage, others continue their researches (Magritte, for example, whose pictures are collages entirely painted by hand, and Dali)."

What exactly is the technique of collage?

He answers, first, with an analogy: If it is the plumes that make the plumage it is not the glue that makes the gluing.

Then he goes to say, that one day during the summer of 1929, a man (a fellow painter) asked him: "What are you doing these days? Are you working?" He replied: "Yes, I'm making gluings. I'm preparing a book that will be called La Femme 100 Tetes." Then the man whispered in his ear: "And what sort of glue do you use?"Max explains that With that modest air that his contemporaries admired in him he was obliged to confess to the fellow painter that in most collages there wasn't any glue at all. And also that he's wasn't responsible for the term "collage"; that of the fifty-six titles in the catalogue of my exhibition of collages in Paris in 1920, an exhibition which, according to Aragon: ". . . is perhaps the first showing which allows one a glimpse of the resources and the thousand means of an entirely new art -- in this city where Picasso has never had the opportunity of exhibiting his constructions in steel wool, cardboard, bits of cloth, etc."

Aragon once said, "the place to catch hold of the thought of Max Ernst is where with a bit of color, some crayon, he attempts to acclimate the phantom which his is about to plunge into a strange landscape."

He was right, because it was at this point that the bright bridge was flung between those two procedures which prompted the inspiration;  frottage and collage.


Max Ernst, Untitled (Unpublished collage for 'Une Semaine de Bonté'), 1934.
     (http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/E/3237/artist_name/Max%20Ernst/record_id/18867)

Ernst, Max. 

Beyond Painting. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948.