Max Ernst's Scientific Methods and Inspirations from La Nature

Science seems to have been an all-pervasive influence on twentieth-century life and ideas. Whatever their opinions of science, modern artists cannot but reflect to some degree the methods, ideas, and subjects of scientific study in their works of art. Some artists attempt a "photographic" objectivity in their works. Others explore -- to the exclusion of all other trends -- one narrow artistic problem mirroring the narrowing of topic demanded of modern scientific method. Still some others react in more subtle ways.

Max Ernst was drawn to science not for it objectivity or narrow approach, but rather for the subjects open to the scientist that were traditionally closed to the fine artist. In this search for fresh subjects, Ernst joined many modern artists who found traditional landscapes, academic nudes, and, especially, religious subjects powerless to move the members of an industrialized and fast-changing society. In the early twentieth century, artists like Ernst also looked to drawings by children and the sculptures of Africa as non-traditional sources of inspiration. Scientific subjects, however, provided sophisticated European and American artists with obviously Western, complex , and modern visual prototypes.

For example, in The Large Glass or La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibratairs, même (1915-1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Marcel Duchamp pictures human courting and sexual rituals in what can be seen as an elaborate parody of the research scientist's chemical and mechanical procedures. And Paul Klee's  Analysis of Various Perversities (1922, Collection of Heinz Berggruen, Paris) is an inventive "child's" drawing of an anatomy study complete with fanciful laboratory apparatus. Scientific subjects were seen by these and many other twentieth century artists as rich sources of visual ideas that could be developed in highly individualized ways.

Ernst's approach to science was also highly personal. He saw in scientific illustrations a visual form relatively free from the meanings conventional in artistic images. he also found in the diagrams and photographs not aspects of external reality or of absolute truth, but, rather, tantalizing associations with his own values and emotional states. He was not concerned with the abstractions of science -- with mathematical formulas or graphs. He turned instead to the images that revealed scientific processes and investigations: how scientists visualized what was previously invisible. (Many of Ernst's choices come from articles on the use of photography in scientific investigations.) Ernst found in scientific images a fresh way of seeing, and he used them to help make visualizations of the invisible within himself.

 

Marcel Duchamp, 

The Large Glass, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1887-1968.

*(http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/54149.html#) 

Max Ernst,

Historie Naturelle, Kunst Museum; Bonn, Germany, 1926.

*(http://www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/en/sammlungen/max-ernst/)

*Stokes, Charlotte.

 "The Scientific Methods of Max Ernst: His use of Scientific Subjects from La Nature." The Art Bulletin, No.3 (College Art Association), 1980: 453-465.