Art of RetroCollage: Max Ernst: Profile in Collage

April 15, 2011 - PRLog -- Max Ernst (born in Brühl, North Rheinland, Germany 1891; died in Paris, France 1976) was an entirely self-taught artist. Like many young European men of his generation, he was drafted and saw action in the First World War. The revulsion Ernst and his friends felt at the horrors of the War led them to form the Cologne Dada group in 1919.

Ernst began as a painter, but, influenced by the work of Picasso, Paul Klee (whom he knew personally), and Giorgio de Chirico, he started creating collages in 1915. He seems to have been particularly struck by the odd, abrupt juxtapositions of objects and their parts within the landscapes in De Chirico’s paintings. Much of Ernst’s later work (both collage and painting) would evoke irrational scenes of impossible objects in imaginary settings.

Max Ernst: Fiat modes pereat ars (Let There be Fashion, Down with Art) Lithograph. 1919.
But at first Ernst moved into collage slowly. An early series of lithographs, Fiat modes pereat ars (Let There be Fashion, Down with Art), shows line drawings of Chirico-esque tailor’s dummies in scenes with distorted, contradictory, or forced perspective. The letter of collage may be absent, but its spirit is evident in the illogically combined parts of the dummies and their surroundings, which resemble mathematical diagrams, windows, & machine parts.

In the early 20′s, Ernst created actual collages from the great wealth of illustrated 19th-century publications then available: children’s books and magazines; popular scientific journals and books dealing with natural history, anatomy, biology, and paleontology; lurid romantic novels; technical manuals; and catalogues of agricultural machinery, industrial tools and hardware, and educational models and teaching aids. Most of  the illustrations in these books and periodicals were wood engravings, with a scattering of more expensive-to-produce lithographs and halftones. (Many of the technical handbooks and catalogues that were still up-to-date continued to rely on wood engravings and scratchboard drawings — an inexpensive way of producing the wood engraving look without carving a woodblock — well into the mid-20th century, because their images were much easier to see than those of halftone photo illustrations, and more accurate.)

... continued at:

http://blog.retrocollage.com/max-ernst-profile-collage/
For more about Max Ernst, to view Ernst's art and related collages

http://blog.RetroCollage.com/.
Read more Profiles in Collage highlighting Hannah Höch, Joseph Cornell, and others at the website

http://blog.RetroCollage.com/art-gallery/
To view the art gallery of original digital collages, vintage engravings, florals, pentagram patterns, and more at the Art of RetroCollage

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Original art and musings on creativity, aesthetics, art, collage in general, & surrealistic collage & fractal art in particular, with interesting collage facts, history, tips & techniques. Fantasies, the far-out, and florals -- all with a colorful twist.