Celebes (Max Ernst)
| Celebes |
|---|
| Max Ernst , 1921 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 125.4 x 107.9 cm |
|
Tate Gallery of Modern Art , London
Link to the picture |
Celebes (or The Elephant of Celebes ) is an early Surrealist painting by the Dadaist and surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst from 1921. It was created in Cologne shortly before the artist moved to Paris. The work has been part of the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London since 1975 .
background
Max Ernst took over from Giorgio de Chirico , the main representative of the Pittura metafisica , the idea of putting together picture motifs in puzzling combinations in painting at an early stage; this idea was later adopted by the surrealists . It corresponded to the free association that Sigmund Freud used to expose the unconscious in the thoughts of his patients, which was also expressed in dreams. Celebes is the first work in the group of paintings that Max Ernst painted between 1921 and 1924 during the transition between Dada and Surrealism. Ernst created it based on the model of the Dadaist collage , which he had used since 1919 to achieve bizarre combinations of images. However, it was spontaneously painted directly on the canvas without any preparatory collages or sketches with a few changes. Another similar collage-like painting by Max Ernst was, for example, Oedipus Rex from 1922.
André Breton published his first surrealist manifesto in Paris in 1924, which was considered the beginning of the movement. De Chirico had already painted The Song of Love ( Le chant d'amour ) ten years earlier, in 1914 . It shows the puzzling combination of an Apollo bust attached to a house wall and a rubber glove. A train steams in the background. The sentence, often quoted by the surrealists, "As beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissection table" comes from the songs of Maldoror (1868/69) by Lautréamont . Max Ernst spoke of the "systematic exploitation of the accidental or artificially provoked meeting of two or more alien realities on an apparently suitable level".
description
The motif is dominated by a two-legged colossus standing on a stage with a metallic-looking body reminiscent of a diving ball or a powerful vacuum cleaner. At its upper end a trunk-like tube rises, which, surrounded by a pointed collar, ends in a bull's head. Tusks are visible on the lower left of the body. There are superstructures on the back of the "elephant". On the right side of the picture there is a horsetail-like column. In the background of the picture appears a mountain range, vaulted by the sky, which is populated by fish and therefore looks like water. At the lower right edge of the picture, a female, bare, headless figure swings her right arm, which is wearing a glove, upwards. The left forearm points to the lower right out of the painting.
Interpretations
The title associates an old German mocking verse: The elephant from Celebes / has something yellow on the back / the elephant from Borneo / it has the same in front . The term "Celebes" is the original name for the Indonesian island of Sulawesi , the shape of which is reminiscent of an elephant.
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According to Werner Spies , the ball floating on the right side of the picture should be pushed with the (billiard) stick on the left into the circular opening in the middle of the monstrous cauldron-like creature. A huge clay grain silo from southern Sudan , which Max Ernst saw on a wood engraving reproduction, is said to have served as the ethnological source for this short-legged creature .
The atmosphere of violence in Celebes and the seemingly mechanical, elephant-like monster can be related to Ernst's traumatic experiences as a soldier in World War I , which he mentioned in his autobiography. The "elephant" is reminiscent of a military tank , and the mechanical element with an eye on the colossus could be a periscope . It appears to be in an airport and the clouds of smoke in the sky could be from a downed airplane.
The “horsetail” on the right can be interpreted as a phallus symbol, and the naked female figure at the bottom right could be a mythological allusion to the seduction of Europa by Zeus , disguised as a bull, whose head appears at the end of the trunk.
Work relationships
| The Emperor of Wahaua |
|---|
| Max Ernst , 1920 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 83.5 × 78 cm |
|
Folkwang Museum , Essen
Link to the picture |
In the painting Celebes , Max Ernst used elements similar to those that appeared in his work The Kaiser von Wahaua as early as 1920 . A woman hovers over the man in the foreground - stylized into a medallion. The emperor plays with a stick and balls, and the medallion seems to become balls. The sky, cloudy with fish, in turn refers to the fight of the fish or the victory of the spindle , both from 1917. Birds in the water, fish in the air, or both in the same element, appear again and again in Max Ernst's work. Alfred Kubin included the motif of the fish flying under the sky in an illustration for The Other Side , in which "an angler in an ornamental swing [throws] the fishing rod from the tree into the air to catch the fish swimming there".
In 1987 the artist Jürgen Schieferdecker created an assemblage , a small-format elephant sculpture made of metal and colored varnish, entitled Die Heimkehr des Elefanten Celebes (for Max Ernst) , which can be seen in the collection of the Dresden State Art Collections .
Provenance
Max Ernst painted Celebes in Cologne in 1921 before moving to Paris the following year. His friend Paul Éluard immediately bought the painting from him and a year later the Oedipus Rex . In 1938 it was bought by the British painter, art historian and collector Roland Penrose , and in 1975 it came to the collection of the "Elephant Trust" - a society founded by Penrose and his wife, the American photographer Lee Miller , the American photographer Lee Miller Tate Gallery in London.
literature
- Roland Penrose: Max Ernst's Celebes . University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1972
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion , Tate Gallery, London 1991, p. 161, quoted from the Tate Gallery's web link
- ↑ Ronald Alley: Catalog of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists , Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, quoted from the Tate Gallery's web link
- ↑ Oedipus Rex , sfmoma.tumblr.com, accessed 24 April 2012
- ^ The Song of Love , moma.org, accessed May 1, 2012
- ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: The history of art in the 20th century. From the avant-garde to the present . CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-48197-3 , p. 90 f.
- ^ Lothar Fischer: Max Ernst , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969, p. 58
- ↑ The Elephant of Celebes , volksliederarchiv.de, accessed on April 20, 2012
- ↑ Volker Barth: Understanding Art: Is Max Ernst's Celebes a New Type of Elephant? , wize.life, accessed October 8, 2018
- ↑ grain silo made of mud , esgoz.files.wordpress.com, accessed on June 9, 2012
- ↑ Werner Spies (Ed.): Max Ernst. Collages. Inventory and contradiction . DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7701-2288-7 , p. 111 and note 579
- ↑ Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion , Tate Gallery, London 1991, p. 161, quoted from the Tate Gallery's web link
- ↑ Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy: Surrealism , Taschen, Kön 2004, p. 50
- ↑ Alfred Kubin: The other side , Munich 1909, chapter confusion of the dream , p. 181
- ↑ Werner Spies (Ed.): Max Ernst. Collages. Inventory and contradiction , Cologne 1988, p. 111
- ^ The homecoming of the elephant Celebes (for Max Ernst) ( Memento from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, accessed on April 24, 2012
- ^ Elephant Trust , elephanttrust.org.uk, accessed April 21, 2012
