Max Ernst came from Cologne and he was
one of the leading members of the Dada movement
and then when that transformed into Surrealism,
he was a leading figure and really the first painter
to be associated directly with the Surrealist movement.
The Surrealists loved collage, because it enabled them to
bring together found materials.
Placing them in a context which was unexpected and irrational.
But source material that they had not made themselves.
That they had simply found in the environment.
So they were creating disorder out of an ordered environment.
It’s rather like Duchamp taking the urinal and placing it in an art exhibition.
It’s a rather similar kind of mindset.
And collage became one of the principal ways of working
for many Surrealist artists and Ernst in particular.
You’re cutting from what, to the viewer or the reader,
would be very familiar sources
Ernst liked to use 18th century/19th century journals,
popular novels which people were very familiar with.
And then just add one or two tiny elements
and you’d look at and think ‘Oh yes, I recognise that’
and then you’d look again and find that it was something deeply disturbing!
Well this particular image is made using an illustration
from a popular novel.
And what Ernst has done is to take the image
showing a rustic room, a woman with folded arms,
who is in fact as we know from the caption in the original illustration,
interrogating rather angrily, a man sleeping in a kind of chamber off to the right.
The woman is wearing on her head something that,
from a distance, looks like a hat, a cap - a lace cap:
in fact, it’s a mask!
From the mouth of the man, pours a kind of ectoplasm or cloud,
which is so fused with the original background of the illustration
that it’s hard to believe that it’s actually an add-on rather than part of the original illustration.
Then flying through the open doorway towards the top right,
is another masked figure, this time wearing a bird mask.
And this bird figure is one who appears again and again in Max Ernst’s work,
whom he called ‘Lop-Lop’ the superior of birds
and who was a sort of mythological figure created by Ernst – a kind of alter-ego.
This series of little volumes are all part of a publication called ‘Une Semaine de Bonte’
– ‘A Week of Grace’.
Each volume has a title,
it has an element and this is the one we’ll look at,
which is ‘Tuesday’ and the element is fire as indicated
by the fiery colour of the cover.
And then throughout the book, there is no text, there’s just the titles of the chapters,
but he has produced prints on each side of the plate
and in each one, if you look carefully, you can see a dragon; the theme is there.
And as the text, if you like, the images flow through the book,
you’re struggling to make a story out of it.
There is no particular story – but that is part of the whole disruptive element.
Now what all this adds up to, is up to the spectator or reader.
This is a sort of story with a plot that you can invent for yourself.
And in the collage novels, you look from one image to the other
and you try to create a kind of connecting thread.
And the same sorts of characters appear,
but there’s no kind of rational explanation
– it’s a kind of anti-novel, in the normal sense.