Featured Artist of the Day: Ivan Alifan

Ivan Alifan

Russia, 1989

Oil Painter

"Porcelain Skin"

"Tears of the Moon" 

"The Veil"

All words and images in this post are the creation and property of the artist, Ivan Alifan.

For more information about this artist, please visit his official website, HERE.

Featured Artist of the Day: Magdalena Pankiewicz

Magdalena Pankiewicz

Warsaw, Poland

Drawing, Painting, Illustration

ilustracja-mody.blogspot.com

All images on this page are the creation and property of the artist, Magdalena Pankiewicz.

For more information about the artist and her works, please click HERE.

Max Ernst: Massacre of the Innocents

Max Ernst. "The Massacre of the Innocents" 1920

In Max Ernst’s Massacre of the Innocents one sees an entirely different mode of image construction and a greater emphasis on societal critique.  This image is composed of a black and white photo of what seems like a possible night time city scape, with various drawings over it in watercolor, gouache, and black ink.  These can appear to be buildings or ladders depending on what angle they are viewed from, and seem to jut out of the city and into space in impossible directions.  Out of this scene of chaos spring four amorphous human figures.  The two on the right and the one on the bottom left are composed of pure flat, unmodulated color and seem to be running hurriedly out of the city scene; the singular figure in the top left has the foot and general shape of the running figures, though it is modified and slightly more detailed in the body to resemble what could be a machine-like head and wings – possibly an airplane.  The night sky is filled in with dark and emotionally motivated visible brush strokes of bluish black, intensifying the dreary, mysterious, and chaotic scene below.

Massacre of the Innocents is deeply laden with ideas connected to the art of the insane, surrealism, and a cultural critique of the destruction of the modern machine instigated by the terrors of World War I.  The use of a photo for the background city acts to engage the viewer as it is a familiar scene of everyday life, while the jutting building/ladders and the floating figures disturb the image by turning it into a nightmare view of the chaotic modern city.  This image calls to mind a common theme within Ernst’s works of this time: the representation of his own anxieties about the body and the necessity of “lines between self and world necessary to a sense of autonomy.”[1]  This is seen in the radical emphasis of the individual’s hostile estrangement from the world and from each other indicated by the illusion that the figures are floating or running to get out of the scene in opposite directions of one another.  The chaotic combination of the twinkling cityscape and the spatially confusing buildings/ladders offers a stark contrast to the minimalist colorful body shapes which attempt to escape it, while the dark outline of each body further emphasizes the separation between body and world.  These bodies are also reminiscent of the ideas of the primitive figures seen in works such as Matisse’s Music of 1910, which ties this image to the idea in the art of the insane, that the “madness” is a “regression to a primitive stage of psycho-physical development”[2] through which modern artists could access the unconscious, and a way to progress forward from the destructions of mechanized modern-day life.   

This idea of the primitive unconscious and the dreamlike trauma created in the floating and barely shaped human figures as well as the unrealistic and unidentifiable angles of the building/bridges ties this image to the focus on dream images within the production of Surrealist images.[3]  The menacing and disfigured airplane-person figure and the unnerving maze created with the jutting building/bridges also serve to emphasize the terror imposed on and created by the modern machine within everyday life.

Unless otherwise noted, the thoughts and opinions in this article are solely those of the author: SadieFaye

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[1] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 182.

[2] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 180.

[3] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 190.

Max Ernst: Self-Constructed Little Machine

Max Ernst "Self-Constructed Little Machine" 1919/20

Max Ernst’s Self-Constructed Little Machine is a pencil sketch that unites the Dadaist concern with the possibility of personal and cultural destruction by the machine (a response to World War I), and the surrealist fascination with Freud.  This image depicts two machines placed on either side of the paper with an explanation of the scene in Ernst’s own handwriting that seems to be “a confused account…that conflates sex and scatology.”[1]  

 From simply viewing the image, the depicted machines might be hard to categorize. The machine on the right somewhat resembles a wind turbine with capital letter A’s placed in a round near the top, with what a viewer of today might recognize as a solar panel above it- though this object would not have been known to Ernst at the time of the image’s creation.  The machine on the left resembles a giant saw, waiting at ready for someone to pull it down and cut something.  Art historians have discovered that the image is actually based on a “found printer’s proof” depicting a “drum figure with numbered slots” on the left and a “tripod personage” on the right[2].  Ernst also plays with the spatial relation of the two objects by adding a mismatching tilt to the flat surface lines on which they appear to stand.

The numerous effects and visual oddities within this work can be explained to have origins and relations to both the Dada and Surrealist movements.  Its inspiration from a found object is representative of the Dadaists play with such objects in novel combinations as a way to create a feeling of shock and to cause reason for societal evaluation and revolution; while the fact that the original object was a printer’s proof is indicative of Dada’s embrace of the “new synthesis of avant-garde art with technology.”  This represents both Dada’s critique of and reliance on the materials and machines of modern society.  While a large part of the Dadaist artistic and political motivations were a reaction to the destructive and negative world changes brought about by the machine as a response to WWI, they also embraced the new mechanical advances in printing technology as a way to spread their ideas to a greater population[3]^,[4] .

The Self-Constructed Little Machine can also be linked to ideas within the production of “the art of the insane”- with which Ernst dedicated himself to while still in his Dadaist phase.  The modernist interpretation of the art of the insane as “directly revelatory of the unconscious” came from the publications of the psychologist Lombroso, whose ideas surfaced in the early 1920s.[5]  Ernst used the “disturbances of schizophrenic representation” to “disrupt the principle of identity” in terms of both art and the self.  It is this freedom from reality that lead Ernst to develop the idea of the body as a “dysfunctional machine” which can be seen within this image, and within some of his early Dadaist collages.[6]  Upon closer examination of the work itself, one discovers the hidden bodies within the machines; the object on the right a knock-kneed quasi-man with the protruding A's as arms, and the solar panel type object as a head.  There is also a long cylindrical object placed between the “legs” which can be thought of as a phallic symbol.  Its detachment from the body is crucial in light of the burgeoning interest in Freud at this time, as a possible representation of the male castration anxiety.  The object on the left can be seen not only as the source of this castration anxiety in the female form (suggested by the numbered slots in the drum, or the slot in the middle of the base of the machine), but also as the saw itself which physically removed the phallic shape from the body of the machine-man on the right.  On the base of the “female” machine there appears to be a pair of glasses, which could represent the new vision of reality, of the self, and of the female counterpart that was revealed through the experience of a young boy’s realization that his mother does not have the same parts that he does.  This integration of symbols that represent castration anxiety into the image can be seen as a connection and possibly an influence to the Surrealists, whose main preoccupation was the depiction of the ideas of psychoanalysis and dream images.

To read more about Max Ernst’s pivotal role in the transition from Dadaism to Surrealism and for an in-depth look at his work, Massacre of the Innocents…check back here tomorrow!

Unless otherwise noted, the thoughts an opinions in this article are solely those of the author: SadieFaye

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[1] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 183.

[2] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 183.

[3] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 135.

[4] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 168.

[5] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 180.

[6] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 183.

Max Ernst: Dadaist and Surrealist

Max Ernst is often described as “the German Dadaist turned Surrealist,”[1] a title which can be explored and understood through his two works, Self-Constructed Little Machine (1919) and Massacre of the Innocents (1920).  This appellation is not only afforded by his status as one of many modernists exploring ideas found in the art of the insane (a movement which gained substantial interest within the artistic community by the early 1920s[2]), but also by the various new techniques of pictorial creation which he began developing during his engagement with the Dada artists.  These techniques, including collage, frottage (producing an image through rubbing), grattage (creating an image through scraping), his early collages, and his “veristic dream paintings,” proved to be highly influential to the later ideas that fueled Surrealism[3]^{, [4]}.

Massacre of the Innocents from 1920 and Self-Constructed Little Machine from 1919 originate from Max Ernst’s Dada period, and suggest continuity between Dada and Surrealism in both their subject matter and composition.  A comparison of these two works offers a wide range of critiques on modern culture and the destruction of World War I.  These works also show a move away from other forms of abstraction and modernism in their renewed concern with the subject matter itself and the impression and meaning therein.  They accomplish this while also giving consideration to the various novel and inventive mediums through which these ideas could be made transmissible to their audience.  This combination of effect of both medium and subject matter is a step away from the supreme priority placed on the artist’s medium found in earlier forms of abstraction.

By utilizing both the medium and thematic elements in these images, Max Ernst was able to offer a powerful critique on the use and destruction of the modern machine as well as to transform specific elements and themes of the Dada movement into inspirational material for the Surrealists.

To read a more in-depth analysis of the two works mentioned above and their connection to both Dadaism and Surrealism, please check back later this week!

Unless otherwise noted, the ideas in this article are solely those of the author: SadieFaye

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[1] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Volume 1: 1900-

               1944 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 182.

[2] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 180.

[3] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 183.

[4] Hal Foster et al, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 190.