The oeuvre of Max Ernst exists and continues to unfold as one definitely individual achievement. It does so outside of or, better yet, beyond all "isms", manifestos, artist groups, which have long fulfilled their function as protests or signs of new artistic methods. If we were to glance back on to what is truly essential in Max Ernst the artist, we would find first his unwavering and prophetic rejection of "Material reality", which once seemed so permanently secure, but now has become increasingly questionable in our day. Second, we would find his continuously adventurous journeys through the realm of the psyche. Like a magician, he seems to have constantly searched for testimonials and images, rites and symbols, putting into visual questions those mysterious forces, those daemonic tensions within our co-native drives, as well as the hovering world of our deepest dreams.
To him anxiety and aggressiveness emerge as stigmata of the modern psyche; yet there is the radiant revelation of Nature (as a field for the exploration of the "miracle par excellence"), which lies bare and is penetrated in her most minute and microscopic structures. All boundaries are gone; everything exists only in permanent metamorphosis: plant, stone, man, animals, as well as the world of dead things which still remain very alive for Ernst.
If Max Ernst could ever change into an animal, he would certainly emerge as a bird--possibly a bird of dream and prey--with a characteristic sharp, hooked beak: a bird of bizarre beauty. The heraldic bird in his escutcheon, his totem, must also be winged. as a matter of fact, his private phantom, called Loplop, is such a grand seigneural bird, his alter ego, which turns up in his book of dreams and horrors "La Femme 100 têtes", the one with a hundred heads without a head (as he entitles the book ambiguously, phonetically).
It is the Loplop which occupies a dominating position also in his later works and illustrations, ruling over everything.
Max Ernst,
Illustration 120 in the book "La Femme 100 Tetes", Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 1929.
Max Ernst,
Illustration 118 in the book "La Femme 100 Tetes", Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1929.
**(http://art.famsf.org/max-ernst/illustration-120-book-la-femme-100-tetes-2002172120)
*Giedion-Welcker, Carola, and Ernst Scheyer.
"Max
Ernst: Irony-Myth-Structure." Critisism, No. 2, 1964: 105-113.
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