Tag Archives: max ernst

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Leonora Carrington, Green Tea

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leonora carrington green tea photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

During World War II, after the imprisonment of then partner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington fled France and sought asylum in Spain. There, she experienced a series of psychological crises. Her family placed her in a sanatorium against her will, where she was subjected to severe treatments. Carrington eventually moved to New York, where Andre Breton encouraged you to write about her experiences in the Surrealist  journal VVV.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Max Ernst, The Nymph Echo

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Nymph Echo
Photo By Gail

The diminutive nude female figure in the upper right area of  The Nymph Echo (1936) is often identified as Echo — a mountain nymph of Greek Mythology. Far more dominant, however, is the monstrous green vegetal creatures —  or is it creatures — in the foreground. This wildly imaginative hydra-headed creation may represent Narcissus, whom Echo loved.  Famously, Narcissus fell in love with his own beautiful image reflected in a pool and wasted away from unsatisfied desire, whereupon he was transformed into a flower. The various delicately colored floral effusions in Ernst’s painting recall this moment of metamorphosis.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC

 

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Max Ernst, The Gramineous Bicycle

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The Gramineous Bicycle
Photo By Gail

Max Ernst was fascinated with microscopic images, which were first broadly distributed in the early twentieth century. For The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses (1921), he created an overpainting on the ambitious scale of traditional oil painting by using a commercially available teaching chart. Ernst inverted the found poster, which contains magnified views of brewer’s yeast cells, and selectively painted in a black background. He then painted gears and bands, as well as humanizing details including eyes, noses, limbs, and whiskers to create a virtual circus of tightrope walkers, clowns and cyclists. The inscription lands amusing sexual connotations to the hairs, orifices and protrusions of these microorgasms.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

 

 

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Max Ernst, Woman, Old Man and Flower

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Max Ernst Woman Old Man Flower
Photo By Gail

Max Ernst painted the first state of Woman, Old Man and Flower in 1923, the year after he moved from Cologne to Paris to join the nascent Surrealist group. He subsequently modified elements of this picture. Most astonishingly, he added the mysterious, partially transparent, partially modeled, fan-topped figure in the foreground — presumably the flower referenced in the painting’s title. Even before leaving Germany, Ernst had been thinking about translating the collage and overpainting strategies of his small Dada works on paper into oil on canvas. The results achieved included radical leaps in scale, intensified colors, and what he described to fellow Dadaist Tristan Tzara as “a much insaner effect.”

Photographed as part of the Exhibit, Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, Up Through January 1st, 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: On Time Off Time By Dorothea Tanning

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On Time Off Time

Dorothea Tanning (August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism, and she was the 4th and final wife of famous German surrealist Max Ernst (1891 – 1976).
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