(1891-1976)


Ernst was born and worked in Germany before he became a leader in the Dada movement and one of the prime explorers of montage techniques. He moved to France in 1922 where he joined Andre' Breton in developing the Surrealist movement. Ernst was the most deliberate in the application of Surrealist principles, one of his many techniques was to induce '"pure psychic automatism," The literary underpinnings of the movement are evident in his important citation of one of the Surrealist heroes: the child prodigy, nineteenth-century rebel-poet Arthur Rimbaud.

ERNST'S THOUGHTS ON ART

"The procedure of frottage, resting thus upon nothing more than the intensification of the irritability of the mind's faculties by appropriate technical means, excluding all conscious mental guidance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called, up to now, the "author" of the work, this procedure is revealed by the following to be the real equivalent of that which is already known by the term automatic writing. It is as a spectator that the author assists, indifferent or passionate, at the birth of his work and watches the phases of its development. Even as the role of the poet, since the celebrated lettre de vyant of Rimbaud, consists in writing according to the dictates of that which articulates itself in him, so the role of the painter is to pick out and project that which sees itself in him. In finding myself more and more engrossed in this activity (passivity) which later came to be called "critical paranoia," and in adapting to the technical means of painting (for example: the scraping of pigments upon a ground prepared in colors and placed on an uneven surface) the procedure of frontage which seemed applicable at first only to drawing, and in striving more and more to restrain my own active participation in the unfolding of the picture, and, finally, by widening in this way the active part of the mind's hallucinatory faculties I came to assist as spectator at the birth of all my works, from the tenth of August, 1925,~memorable day of the discovery of frontage. A man of "ordinary constitution" (I employ here the words of Rimbaud), I have done everything to render my soul monstrous.A Blind swimmer, I have made myself see. I have seen. And I was surprised and enamored of what I saw, wishing to identify myself with it" (1948)

 

 

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