Max Ernst and Surrealism
Exhibition Posters: Max Ernst House Huismes
Max Ernst, the French Surrealist, died on his birthday, 1 April 1976.
He loved the irony. It was, you might say, surreal.
This year, 2024, marks the Centenary of Surrealism.
One magical day in the Adrien Dubouché Museum in Limoges, the largest collection of porcelain and ceramics in Europe, we mourned the passing of superb craftsmanship.
What happened? When?
The answer was in the next room.
On the wall, on display, was a urinal, the kind found in any plumber’s merchant.
Marcel Duchamp displayed it in a New York Gallery.
The Rubicon had been crossed. From now on, a work of art was anything an artist said it was.
Duchamp was one of the leading pioneers of Dada before the short lived movement transmuted into Surrealism.
In the Max Ernst house in Huismes not far from Amboise, is one of Duchamp’s other two fingers to the art world. A wine bottle rack topped by a bust of Rabelais, hero of surrealists.
Bottle Rack: Max Ernst House Huismes
He and Duchamp were lifelong friends.
So intrigued were we with Ernst and his Surrealist Fountain in Amboise we published a book about it and his life.
André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.
He was years behind the time. He ‘borrowed’ the term ‘surrealism’ from the French writer Apollinaire who coined it in 1917.
All Breton did was to give it a label which then and now, defies definition.
Fashions in art, or anything else for that matter, do not materialise out of thin air.
Long before Max Ernst was a Surrealist, he was a Da Da-ist.
He had already created almost two hundred works of art including Celebes before Breton published his Manifesto.
Celebes in Tate Modern London.
Ernst foreshadowed Breton by several years.
Max co-founded DaDa in Cologne in 1919 (dada is a baby’s first attempt at speech).
Revolted by the horrors of the 1914-18 World War, a group of young artists decided that if carnage was what society had come to, you can keep it.
Convinced that art can change the world (has it? Ever?) they set about destroying society’s values.
They decided to create a new, anti-aesthetic, anarchic kind of art.
Twenty years later, in 1939, when another world war broke out, Surrealism ended in disillusionment.
It did not change the world but did change the world of art.
The movement died out but the artists didn’t.
Leonora Carrington, the love of Ernst’s life, the most gifted Surrealist of them all, carried the torch until her dying day (2011)
Post by Pamela Shields BA History of Art. Photography by Mark Playle.
Read more about Max Ernst’s life and the Amboise Fountain.
Max Ernst and The Genie of Amboise
eBook, Paperback, Hardback
