Max Ernst. Book graphics by the first surrealist.
Max Ernst was born in 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne, Germany. In the history of the livre d’artiste or artist’s book, he is remembered for his colorful innovations and loud style. His work provoked anger, protest, and admiration. The Nazis in Germany declared his art “degenerate”, but we know that trusting their aesthetic preferences is a ruinous endeavor. So, in this article, we’ll look at people without heads, people with bird heads, people with heads of… Well, at Max Ernst’s book design. He devoted 60 years of his life to this work.
In 1922 the painter illustrated two books on the text of Paul Éluard. Max Ernst worked with absurdist collages, images and fragments of which he took from completely different sources: books on paleontology, manuals for repairing and operating stove chimneys, advertising catalogs, and so on. He took them out of their ordinary context and combined them together. After such “surgical operations” the images lost their original meaning and acquired a completely new and literally detached from reality. To understand his illustrations was a very difficult task for his contemporaries. The perception of the “reader” with such a collage inevitably led him to a dead end, that is, to the most favorite direction of any self-respecting Dadaist.
“The art of collage is the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked encounter of two of more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane and the spark of poetry created by the proximity of these realities.” — Max Ernst about collages
The art of Dadaism and Surrealism gave the artist a huge arsenal of visual media and a wide floor for experimentation. To better understand Ernst’s work it is necessary to describe his working methods a little:
1. We have already learned from which depths the artist took inspiration for his collages.
2. In 1925 Ernst invented the technique of frottage. He placed paper atop some rough materials — wood floorboards, lengths of twine, leaves, wire mesh, crumpled paper, crusts of bread — and rubbed the surface with a pencil.
3. He also invented the technique of grattage, a method of making drawings by scratching with a pen or sharp instrument on paper or canvas filled with ink or oil colors.
In early 1930 Max Ernst is working on three collage novels. In them there is no text, and the role of the plot is played by the surrealistic collages themselves, which are intertwined into a single story. Max Ernst created a total of 149 compositions for the book “The Hundred Headless Woman”. And “A Week of Kindness” consists of 182 works, where each collage number corresponds to a day of the week, the illustrations both start new themes of the narrative and form a harmonious story line.
Ernst’s early books included only black and white illustrations, which were replicated by means of rather cheap reproduction and printed on poor quality paper. But in the second half of the twentieth century, the artist begins to use pictorial means in a new way. Illustrations become colored, and the books become more magnificent.
The book “Prompt Tooth” includes (with some changes) a poem by René Chara. Each of the ten parts of the text is accompanied by a full-page print. The collages look like independent works, not intended for the book. For them Ernst uses clippings from ladies’ magazines, wallpaper, botanical atlases and pieces of lace fabrics. Some details he finalizes on his own. Comparing these works to collage novels, it can be said that they do not hide the heterogeneity of the element, but rather hypertrophy it. From disparate symbols, the reader must assemble the artist’s incoherent text.
65 Maximiliana can be called Max Ernst’s culminating project. It is his joint publication of the artist Max Ernst and the typographer Ilya Zdanevich (Iliaazd).
The book’s title refers to an asteroid discovered in 1861 by German astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Tempel and named by him in honor of Maximilian II, King of Bavaria.
A textual and visual tribute to Tempel as a kindred spirit, seeking to comprehend spaces that are beyond normal human perception. Ernst’s illustration performs in a co-metallic play with Ilyazd’s typography, arranged across the spreads like constellations. And the obscure symbols that appear on the pages are hieroglyphs invented by Ernst.
What is collage?
— It is a kind of alchemy of visual image. A miracle of complete transformation of creatures and objects with or without changing their physical or anatomical appearance….
What is the mechanism of collage?
— I tend to consider it as an unexpected meeting of two distant realities in an inappropriate space into an alien environment, in accordance with André Breton’s thesis…
What is the most important conquest of collage?
— The irrational. The powerful invasion of the irrational in all spheres of art, poetry, science, in fashion, in the private lives of individuals and in the public life of nations. To speak of collage is to speak of the irrational…..
The systematic joining together of the thoughts of two or more authors in one work (in other words, collaboration) can also be considered akin to collage…”
Max Ernst
