San Miguel Art magazine/ San+Miguel+Art+magazine%2FOctober+ | Page 37

Just
as Max Ernst belongs to the ancient
history of art, he belongs to the present world as
one of the main initiators who went into surrealism
in painting and sculpture.
He was born German in 1891 and distinguished
himself as a painter, sculptor, graphic designer
and poet, if that were not enough, with the
visual arts. As prolific artist, he was one of the
pioneers of Dadaism, the artistic movement
which was characterized by revolt against literary
and especially artistic conventions and to mock
bourgeois artists and their art. Later it would be one
of the creative pillars of surrealism.
In 1922 he took Paris as a residence, to dedicate
himself to paint works full of mythical figures that
were in scenarios outside of reality.
He spawned fantastic creatures in
a Renaissance setting in which he
cares rigorously for details, such as
«L›eléphant célèbes»,
currently at the Tate Gallery in London.
He was a restless artist, discontented in the
good sense of the word, for he studied all sorts
of possibilities and techniques. He invented
the «frottage», used to transfer textures of an
object to the canvas by rubbing it with the pencil.
During World War II, the Germans made him a
prisoner, and in his confinement, he continued
creating until he invented «decals» to transfer his
paintings to metal or glass. He called this technique
«Decalcomanía»
He made a series of sculptures based on the
assemblage technique with wood and wire in
response to the crisis of painting that Dadá
established.
In 1939 Ernst already worked with collages. Of
that time is the illustrated novel The Woman of 100
heads. Dream of a girl who wanted to enter the
Carmel. A week of goodness, or, the Seven Capital
Elements. Titles as extensive as descriptive works.
It is easy for him to join the pile of «madmen»
who wandered through the panoramas of Parisian
art. André Bretón who from the letters is the true
initiator of SURREALISM, Picazo and Dalí, Marcel
Duchamp, and the photographer Man Ray, among
others, who meet in the Café de Flore to insult each
other, to praise each other and to create manifestos