Sunday 19 October 2008

ART SUNDAY - MAX ERNST


“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” – Marcel Proust

The last couple of Sundays I have been choosing surrealistic paintings, and today I am continuing the trend with a painting by Max Ernst (1891-1976). He was a German painter-poet who was a member of the Dada movement and a founder of surrealism. A self-taught artist, he formed a Dada group in Cologne, Germany, with other avant-garde artists. He pioneered a method called frottage, in which a sheet of paper is placed on the surface of an object and then penciled over until the texture of the surface is transferred. In 1925, he showed his work at the first surrealist painting exhibition in Paris.

This painting from 1944 is called “The Eye of Silence” and is characteristic of Ernst’s style. Vibrant colour, irrelevant, painstaking detail, writhing forms, organic evolving rocks and hidden enigmatic figures that contribute to the dream-like state depicted in the painting.

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